Babette’s Feast

Gabriel Axel's Babette's Feast (1987) became the first Danish film ever to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and it remains one of the most quietly beloved of all films 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 allows her to prepare a single lavish French dinner for the congregation of her late benefactor, the meal becomes a kind of sacrament — a slow, sensuous sequence in which long-buried feeling, old loves and old quarrels are gently reawakened around the table. Axel films the years of self-denial and the climactic feast alike with patient, unhurried tenderness.

The film has been embraced far beyond cinephile circles — it has been cited approvingly by theologians, and was reportedly named a favourite by Pope Francis — as a parable of generosity and the redemptive, reconciling power of art freely given. Warm without a trace of sentimentality and deeply moving in its restraint, Babette's Feast is a small miracle of a film, and lasting proof that the richest of all dramas can be found in a single, perfectly served meal.