Babbette's Feast.

FILM FOOD FOR THOUGHT

ISAK DINESEN'S tale "Babette's Feast" is contained in her last collection, Anecdotes of Destiny (1958), and it is one of the author's finest; it is a sort of miracle that Gabriel Axel's film adaptation does not diminish it. I know little about Axel, a Dane who grew up in France and acted in Jouvet's company (which means he can't be a spring chicken, to use a culinary metaphor this patent gastronome would appreciate); I cannot recall encountering his previous films. In any case, the movie Babette's Feast is, like the tale, enormously civilized, steeped in provocative irony, and exalted by strong sentiments eloquently restrained.

Written and directed by Axel, the film begins with two senescent but still comely sisters living in a small fishing village on Denmark's bleak Jutland peninsula. (The tale is situated in Norway, but no matter.) Martine and Philippa, named after Luther and Melanchthon, are the daughters and spiritual heirs of the late dean, who led his tiny Lutheran community in a religion as austere as the land- and sea-scape, with preaching and hymn-singing as forbidding as the water-soaked and boiled cod and squid and the grim water-and-beer-soaked "ale bread" on which the community largely subsists. Near the start, we see one of the sisters offering an old man typical alms: some pale blue woolens and some earth-colored soup. These will be the colors of the film.

In Henning Kristiansen's masterly cinematography we get--aside from the blacks and whites preponderantly worn by the faithful--mostly bleached earth and sea colors, especially a deadly pale blue that seems to have seeped into everything, beginning with the very air. Much of the movie feels as if it were about that blue--said to be the color of hope, especially of the hope for heaven that sustains the late dean's flock. But this is not a hopeful blue; rather, it is the blue of rinses for old women's hair, of laundry washed in too much bluing--a bilious blue, if that isn't a contradiction in colors, and even if it is. Early on, we get one glimpse of a red shingled roof, but forthwith all is bluish, except for the interiors, where dark wood colors, grudgingly burnished by lamp- or candle-light, extend the visual diet. The mood is enhanced by Per Norgard's spare, suggestive music.

The elderly ladies have a mysterious French housekeeper--really a maid of all work--Babette, who, for no pay at all, cooks, does all the chores, saves money with Gallic shrewdness in bargaining, and frees the sisters for keeping their dead father's memory and work alive; still, as the aging faithful fall more and more to squabbling, fears and doubts begin to surface. We, too, wonder: What is this Frenchwoman--an ambulantly dormant but clearly not extinct volcano--doing here? Why did these sisters, still beautiful in advancing age, never marry, though they must have been the cynosures of male eyes in the village? Presently we go into flashbacks where, with the help of intelligently used narration delivered by what might pass for Karen Blixen's (Isak Dinesen's) own voice, we are duly enlightened.

Enlightened, or lightened, visually as well. For in these scenes in Danish mansions and officers' quarters, and at the Swedish court and Drottningholm Theater, we get some distinctly non-Jutland colors: the rich cobalt of military uniforms, the silvery dazzle of ladies' gowns, the pale greens and pinks of gardens. We meet Lieutenant Lorens Lowenhielm, a young scapegrace whose gambling debts cause his father to exile him for three months to stay with his aunt, who lives near that Jutland village and belongs to the dean's flock. Lorens falls in love with Martine, attends her father's prayer meetings, but remains tongue-tied before such innocence; he leaves for good, kissing the girl's hand and murmuring that he has learned that "in this world there are things which are impossible."

Soon after, a famous baritone of the Paris Opera, Achille Papin, comes for a rest cure and falls for Philippa, who has a voice as fine as her face and whom he hopes to marry and turn into a diva. The dean lets him give her voice lessons, and, as they rehearse the seduction duet from Don Giovanni, Achille kisses Philippa. Frightened, she makes her father discontinue the lessons. The dean discourages lesser suitors by telling them not to deprive him of his right and left hands. The two lovely hands serenely acquiesce.

Years later, Papin sends Babette, whose husband and son were executed as Communards by General Galliffet in 1871, to seek refuge with the sisters. A fine French cook, she must conquer her loathing as the sisters teach her the local cuisine. After still more years, as the late dean's hundredth birthday approaches, a lottery ticket steadily renewed for her by a Parisian friend wins Babette the grand prize of ten thousand francs. She extracts permission from the sisters for a memorial dinner--a real French one--at her own cost. Sparing no expense on ingredients imported from France, she prepares a magnificent feast, though the sisters and the faithful vow to consume without yielding to sensuous pleasures, without praising or complaining, whatever unusual things are served them. As it happens, the aged aunt brings along the now General Lowenhielm, who, flabbergasted, is the only one to appreciate the magnificence of the food and drink.

But, in a generally unacknowledged way, everyone is affected, improved by this meal. The old faithful, without a word of thanks to the cook, bury their puny hatchets; the dean's memory has benefited from the glow of champagne and the patina of caviar; Lorens is reminded of the greatest dinner he ever had, at the Cafe Anglais in Paris (where the chef was, incredibly, a woman), and realizes as well that, as he has never forgotten Martine or been forgotten by her, they were always together in a shared absence; the sisters, who thought they were about to lose their incomparable servant, learn that she will stay on, having blown the ten thousand francs--dinner for 12 at the Cafe Anglais costs just that.

Yet what is in it for "poor Babette"? She is told by her employers that she shouldn't have given it all away for "our sake." "For your sake? No. For my own." And Babette declares, "I am an artist. An artist is never poor." (In the tale, she calls herself a "great artist"; the screenplay is more modest.) And, of course, it is revealed that she was the chef at the Cafe Anglais.

The general comprehends that, "if not in the flesh, which means nothing, in spirit, which is all . . . in this world anything is possible"--something he did not know as a lieutenant--as he and Martine reaffirm their union in separation. And if this awareness came through the bliss of a meal, didn't the general say about the chef of the Cafe Anglais that her dinners were "love affairs . . . in which one no longer distinguishes between bodily and spiritual appetite or satiety"? Still, not all ironies are so benign. General Galliffet, who declared that he would gladly shed his blood for that chef, is the very one who had her menfolk executed as Communards, a fate she would have shared but for her escape. And Achille Papin, who indirectly made Babette's feast possible, is an artist who, as he wrote in the letter of introduction he gave Babette, is now "grey, lonely, forgotten." Justice exists only in heaven, where Philippa's singing (so writes Papin) and Babette's cooking (so, in the end, says Philippa) "will enchant the angels."

A film full of artistry. Observe how the color red--of blood, passion, life--starts reappearing at the end. First in a brief shot of red winter berries on a bush; then in a red plush chair at his aunt's house, where General Lowenhielm debates his younger self; finally, and gloriously, in the big red lapel of his dress uniform at the feast, reinforced by the gold of his sash and epaulets. The triumph of the film, though, is in the subtlety of the script and performances. Even Jarl Kulle, who has been known to overact, is restrained as the general, and Stephane Audran, although a bit too glamorous for Babette, can do wonders with a look, such as the expression of muzzled contempt with which she endures a lesson in how to cook typical Jutland fare. Hanne Stensgard and Vibeke Hastrup are fine as the young sisters; as the older ones, Bodil Kjer and Birgitte Federspiel are even better--especially Miss Federspiel, whose face exudes spiritual beauty. Only Jean-Philippe Lafont, as Papin, though a real singer, is not seductive enough.

And what does the audience get from all this? At the public performance I attended, there was gushing, moaning, and drooling of a downright sexual sort during the banquet scenes, such as, in all my moviegoing, I have never witnessed during a sex sequence. But is that what Babette's Feast is about?