Babette's Feast (Panorama Film A/S, Nordisk Film, Det Danske Filminstitut, Rungstedlundfonden, Astrablu Media, Orion, 1987)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Saturday, October 10 my husband Charles and I watched two films on Turner Classic Movies, one of which I’d seen before and he hadn’t, and one he’d seen before and I hadn’t. The one that was new to me was Babette’s Feast, a 1987 Danish movie of which I’d had a totally wrong idea. I had somehow assumed it was a French film and a relative of Le Grand Bouffe [La Grande Abbuffata] (1973), in which a group of one-percenters decide to throw themselves a grand banquet and literally eat themselves to death. That couldn’t have been farther from the truth, as TCM co-hosts Ben Mankiewicz and Maggie Gyllenhaal quickly revealed in their intro. Babette’s Feast is actually about a century-old religious cult in Denmark (it was based on a 1950 short story by Danish writer Isak Dinesen, though she originally set it in Norway, only writer-director Gabriel Axel decided Norway looked too picturesque to work and instead moved the story to the Danish peninsula of Jutland). The cult’s founder was a stern man who fathered two children, daughters Martine (Birgitte Federspiel) and Filippa (Bodil Kjer), but believed that any physical pleasure, including food as well as sex, was sinful and took you farther away from the glory of God. (Needless to say, I responded big-time to the anti-religious theme of this story.) Though dad is dead by the time the action of the film begins, we see a good deal of him in flashback. It seems that both of his daughters were attracted to foreign men, Martine by Swedish cavalry officer Lorens Löwenhielm (Gudmar Klöfving, a.k.a. Gudmar Wivesson) and Filippa by French operatic baritone Achille Papin (Jean-Philippe Lafont). Only both of them left of their own accord, though we get the impression that dad’s behavior had a lot to do with that. Lorens tells Martine that he’s learned all, he can from the experience and he’s going home to Sweden. As the narrator (Ghita Nørby) Axel insisted on using despite opposition from some of his producers explains to us, Lorens’s experience with religious rhetoric served him well when he got home to Sweden; he married another woman whom he impressed with Bible quotes and ultimately rose through the ranks of the Swedish army until he became a general. (His older incarnation is played by Jarl Kulle, who along with Bibi Andersson as the “Swedish court lady” was one of the late Ingmar Bergman’s favorite actors.)

Papin was so impressed with Martine’s voice he offered to take her with him back to Paris and have her voice professionally trained until she was good enough to star in the Paris Opéra. It’s a nice bit of irony, which I’m sure Axel fully intended, that all the opera excerpts we hear this character sing are from one opera, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and the duet “Là ci darem la mano” Papin and Martine sing together is a virtually exact replica of their actual situation: between an out-of-towner with a reputation for seducing women right, left and center, and an innocent rural girl who’s flattered by the stranger’s attentions but ultimately rejects him. Martine sends Papin back to France and settles in with the remaining members of her dad’s cult, which since it isn’t recruiting new adherents is turning into a batch of crabby old people nurturing their long-standing hatreds. Ultimately Martine and Filippa take in Babette Hersant (Stéphane Audran), a French refugee whose husband and son were both killed in 1871 after the loss of the Franco-Prussian and the short-lived and brutally suppressed attempt to form a socialist government in its wake, the Paris Commune. She pleads with Martine and Filippa for a job, and when the sisters tell her they don’t have any money to hire a servant, the three women agree that Babette can live with them anyway and do household chores to earn her salary. Among her duties is cooking a ghastly-looking and presumably horrible-tasting dish called “bread and ale soup.” Babette has a remaining friend in France who regularly buys her tickets for the French lottery, and 14 years later her number comes up and she receives a prize of 10,000 francs. Babette decides to cook the sisters and the congregants of their cult a sumptuous dinner in honor of the 100th anniversary of the birth of the cult’s founder, the sisters’ late father. Babette literally spares no expense laying in the exotic ingredients and dinnerware needed for the titular feast. She also has an unexpected guest: Lorens Löwenhielm, who is in Denmark on military business and wants to stop by the sisters’ home to make sure he made the right decision by leaving in the first place.

Lorens recognizes the food as identical to the meals he ate years before at a legendary Paris restaurant, the Café Anglais, while he was stationed in the French capital. The other people at the feast are determined not to enjoy it – like the later Hare Krishnas, they deliberately make their own food as bland and tasteless as possible because they believe the purpose of eating is merely sustenance, not pleasure. Lorens says that one of the reasons the Café Anglais had the reputation it did was because of the uncommonly good head chef, who (unusually for that time and place) was a woman. At first where I thought this was going was that the chef had been Babette’s mother and she’d taught Babette all her recipes before Babette lost her family and had to flee France, but later it turns out Babette herself was the chef. After the meal – which lasts so long and features so many courses I was wondering how the people’s stomachs were holding up under the strain of the sheer quantity, never mind the quality, of the food – the sisters are sure that Babette will be taking her lottery winnings and going back to France. Then Babette admits that she’s broke now since she spent all her prize money on the fabulous meal. “Now you will be poor the rest of your life,” Martine tells Babette, to which Babette replies, “An artist is never poor.” Then Filippa chimes in and promises her a great reputation as well as a glorious existence in the life to come, where Filippa expects to regain her voice as well as Babette the opportunity to exercise her culinary skills. (Do people in the Scandinavian version of heaven get to eat at all?) Babette’s Feast is not the sort of movie I ordinarily like – as a confirmed atheist I have no patience at all with stories that portray a life after death and assert its superiority over this one – but I quite enjoyed the film anyway.

For one thing, the sumptuous photography by Henning Kristiansen reminded me of the interview I read years ago with American cinematographer Conrad Hall, who said he was jealous of Ingmar Bergman’s cameraman, Sven Nykvist, simply because Sweden’s position on the planet relative to the sun gave him naturally indirect light with which to work. Instead of either the shrieking hues of the three-strip Technicolor of the 1930’s and 1940’s or the dank greens and browns that predominate most color films made today, either of which would have been totally wrong for this story, Axel and Kristiansen created a striking pastel look that symbolizes both the physical environment in which these characters live and the extent to which all the more vibrant parts of life have almost literally been drained from them. The film is also impeccably directed and quite well acted, and I particularly gave points not only to Birgitte Federspiel and Bodil Kjer but also the seven credited make-up artists (Elisabeth Bukkerhave, Sanne Dandanell, Grethe Holleufer, Birthe Lyngsøe Sørensen, Bente Møller, Lydia Pujols, and Åse Tarp) for the utterly convincing way they manage to play Martine and Filippa both young and old. Stéphane Audran, whom I’m otherwise familiar with only from David Giler’s The Black Bird, his 1976 combination sequel to and spoof of The Maltese Falcon (with George Segal playing Sam Spade, Jr. and Elisha Cook, Jr. and Lee Patrick repeating their roles from the 1941 classic as they’d naturally aged), is properly humble and intense, as if the fires within her can stay banked for only so long. While I’d regard Babette’s Feast mostly as a cautionary tale of how religion destroys people’s lives, it’s an interesting movie and a well-made one that deserved its acclaim (like Nights of Cabiria, Babette’s Feast won its year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film). Incidentally Ben Mankiewicz and Maggie Gyllenhaal saw an odd comparison between the two films, arguing that both are about women who lose their money at the end. I don’t see that at all, frankly, because Cabiria in Fellini’s masterpiece loses hers to a shady scam artist who rips her off with the promise of marriage and a “respectable” lifestyle, while Babette willingly spends hers for one last shot at doing the one thing on this earth she was put here to do and given the talents to do it.