![]() ![]() Textured with muted colors, Axel’s film faithfully follows Blixen’s plot structure with a leisurely paced, first-act flashback that reveals the sisters’ youthful flirtations with an army lieutenant and the Frenchman, a clownish opera star who scares off his quarry by capping a Don Giovanni duet with a fervent kiss. Filippa’s long-departed French suitor charges them with the safety and employment of Babette (Stéphane Audran, shining with quiet authority), a widowed refugee from the Paris commune who lives as their cook, applying her gastronomic skill to the most pedestrian of Scandinavian dishes, until a financial windfall enables her to prepare a special nouvelle cuisine banquet for the women and their increasingly fractious community. Elderly sisters Filippa and Martine (Bodil Kjer and Birgitte Federspiel), the flamekeepers of an ascetic Christian sect founded by their late father, have settled into a charity-based but routine life in a village along the “grandiose and unspoiled” Jutland coast. Adapted from a short story by Karen Blixen, the Danish baroness who wrote as Isak Dinesen, it’s an elemental tale of faith, cultural discomfort, and artistry as both a key to identity and an act of love. ![]() Superficially resembling many an awards-bait horse that followed in its wake, Gabriel Axel’s Babette’s Feast may not be an auteurist classic, but it remains one of the most sublime and transporting of all food-centric movies. ![]()
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