All the film’s ironies gravitate towards this sequence: the final release of some feelings of brotherhood (and sisterhood) in the ecclesiastic Brotherhood, under the influence of the food which they refuse to acknowledge they are eating Babette’s ultimate act of self-sacrifice which is also her most autocratic assertion of self, using the occasion of the celebratory dinner to reveal herself as a ‘great artist’. What is conspicuously expanded here is the feast itself – the preparation, presentation and eating of which has become a set-piece comparable to those in a Hollywood spectacular (the sequence took a fortnight to shoot and employed one of Copenhagen’s top chefs, Jan Pedersen of La Cocotte, as a gastronomic consultant). In many ways, it demonstrates in a minor key what The Dead does in a grander, that the movie adaptation which expands on the mood of a short story is more powerful than the one that compresses the detail of a novel. It might be unfair and unreasonable to accuse Gabriel Axel’s film of having skimped this when it has battened so closely on to Dinesen’s story, reproducing its every scene and as much dialogue as it contains.
But the story summarises how Babette’s Feast delivers a series of spiritual surprises and epiphanies through a similar series of cultural shocks: between the buttoned-up world of a Norwegian fjord and the heady rumours of Parisian decadence between Lutheran and Catholic even, in terms of the local culture, between Lorens Löwenhielm’s sensible choice of a military career and his fear of a family ‘curse’ of mysticism, second sight and association with a ‘Huldre’, one of the female spirits of the mountains. Only long afterwards the missionary learned from his own black servant that what he had partaken of was a small fat grandchild of the chiefs, cooked in honour of the great Christian medicine man.’ Just because this is Dinesen (or Karen Blixen), there is no need to make too much of the African connection. A missionary in Africa, ‘He had saved the life of an old chief’s favourite wife, and to show his gratitude the chief had treated him to a rich meal.
Towards the end of Isak Dinesen’s story, when the two Puritan sisters realise that the magnificent meal they have just been seduced into enjoying has cost the unheard of sum of 10,000 francs, that their housekeeper has squandered her all on a final triumphant demonstration of her art, one of them recalls with a shudder a story told by a friend of her father’s.
0 kommentar(er)
