New to Blu-Ray: Babette's Feast

   Some years ago, I was at a talk given by Fr. Robert Barron, where he referenced the Danish movie, Babette's feast, about a Frenchwoman who fled Revolutionary France, to find herself in a grim little fishing village in Denmark, where she served as a maid to two spinster sisters who were daughters to a respected and beloved preacher.  After many years, Babette pours herself into one last creative burst, where she introduces the people of the town to the elegance of a meal that could only have otherwise been found at a six-star Parisian restaurant.  It is a wonderful movie, and has been a source of encouragement to me through the years in my own priestly ministry, which has its moments of glory interspersed among occasional long stretches of, well, provincial grim-ness.  Providence, love, hope, artistry, grace, gratitude, acceptance, absolution... all of these are on display in the quasi-sacramental, quasi-Eucharistic experience of Babette's Feast. Check it out at Amazon--if you are willing to take the time to savor the images and story presented in this Feast, you won't regret it.  It was released to Blu-Ray by the Criterion Collection yesterday or the day before and was in my mailbox today.

   The Blu-Ray is in Danish (and French) and has English subtitles.  The DVD I owned before (which I loaned out and never got back) did have an English dub track, but between the dub-track, what French I know, and the subtitles, I am not too convinced that any of the translations very good from a critical point of view.  Don't let the language sandbag you, though.  Like being at Mass in a foreign language, you'll know perfectly well what's going on by watching and engaging it in its own terms, rather than straining it through the filter of language.

 

A few years back (2009), I wrote a short review of the movie, which I include below...

 

   The way that the movie comes together is much more than the sum of its parts.  The elderly sisters, Phillipe and Martina, iconically named after the Protestant reformers Martin Luther and Phillip Melchthon, are two pious spinsters who have tried to do everything they can to remain faithful to the legacy of their preacher-father, and that of their deep faith.  In doing so, they have rejected the riches of the world, have chosen to consider romantic love as nothing more than of 'slight importance', and subsist on a thin, nasty 'ale bread' gruel.  Not unlike their namesakes, they represent everything that is, for lack of a better expression, 'puritan'-- I would say even, 'anti-sacramental'.

   Into their lives, seemingly randomly, a mysterious refugee from France (in the time of the Revolution-- a time particularly precarious for Catholics), arrives at the ladies' house and serves as a domestic worker for little more, it seems, than room and board.  She comes into 10,000F from the lottery, and in thanksgiving to the ladies who sheltered her for some 14 years after her arrival, she desires to serve them a real French feast.  The women, who do not know anything other than their modest village accede to her proposal, and almost instantly come to fear what they are about to encounter as they see the foreign produce and wine and the big, scary turtle which are brought in... not to mention their fear in having an encounter with the romantic 'ghosts' of their past.  The ladies and the townspeople, in fear of offending the austere sensibilities of the old, long-gone pastor in whose honor the meal is served, form a pious compact among themselves that, in their lack of concern for the splendors of the world, they will politely eat, but not 'taste' what they are eating.

   The preparation and serving of the feast becomes the focus of the last half of the movie, where the villagers and the women come to 'see' their worlds differently by way of this 'otherworldly' meal... loves left behind, old sins pardoned, fulfillment of the words of scripture and of the ladies' father.  The Eucharistic overtones of the banquet are unmistakable, bringing a new and different life to a poor and perhaps even undeserving people who did not and perhaps still do not know any better.  They cannot help but 'taste' the meal and be drawn into its power to resolve the past fears such a meal represents (such as the inevitable encounter with old loves, the worldly splendor of the meal itself, or perhaps an encounter with the 'turtle from hell').

   In serving the meal and exhausting her fortune, Babette herself finds fulfillment-or perhaps redemption-as a frustrated artist who has for one final time in her life fulfilled her ("priestly"?) calling, not simply to make people happy or to entertain them, but to come to the full self-realization of who she is as a world-class French chef.  It is a moment of 'transfiguration' if you will, not just for her, but for her guests within the confines of this particular time and place and situation when the meal is served.  The spinster sisters--even in their world which no doubt will return to austere puritanism and mean gruel the next day--are forever changed.  At the same time they are touched and even affirmed in their faith by this encounter.  Again, the sacrificial, Eucharistic, and sacramental overtones are unmistakable and an essential part of understanding this movie's message and depth.

   To appreciate this movie, one needs to put the first half hour in perspective and not get lost in it.  It is slow, but it is important development to understand the providence of Babette's arrival.  At moments the story seems slow, but there is plenty of room to take in what is going on and consider it on multiple levels... to savor it like the character of the general sipping the fine wine... rather than gulp it down like some of the townspeople who may never even appreciate what they are enjoying.       --Fr. Tom Donovan