Babette’s Feast

Gabriel Axel's Babette's Feast (1987) was the first Danish film ever to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and it is still one of the best-loved films ever made about food, faith and the workings of grace. It adapts a short story by Karen Blixen, the Danish author who wrote, as Isak Dinesen, the memoir behind Out of Africa.

Stéphane Audran plays Babette, the refugee cook who has spent fourteen years in the frugal, devoted service of two ageing, unmarried sisters in a remote and pious coastal village. When a windfall comes her way, she asks to prepare a single lavish French dinner for the congregation of her late benefactor, a flock that has made a principle of wanting nothing. Axel films the long years of self-denial and the slow, sensuous business of the preparations with the same patient, unhurried tenderness, watching a frugal community confront the prospect of pleasure.

The film has found admirers far beyond cinephile circles. Theologians have cited it approvingly, and Pope Francis reportedly named it a favourite, as a parable of generosity and of art freely given. It is warm without a trace of sentimentality and deeply moving in its restraint, and Babette's Feast makes a whole drama out of one meal, cooked well for people who did not think they wanted it.