Babette's Feast and the Foretaste of Heaven

The following is an excerpt of a review of Babette's Feast (one of my favorites films for its themes of redemption and trasncedence) by Thomas S. Hibbs. Read on and be sure to check out this great Danish film.

Babette’s Feast (is) a story of the sacramental celebration of sensible delight and communal reconciliation as a sign of the heavenly banquet (Luke 14:23 and Matthew 22:1-10). Set in Denmark amid a small, austere community of Protestant Christians, united in their devotion to their founding pastor, whom they honor as “priest and prophet,” the film focuses on the founder’s beautiful daughters, Martine and Filippa. Named after the great reformers Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon, the daughters early on attract the attention of worthy suitors. Neither daughter is capable of freeing herself from her father and the community he has established. One of Martine’s suitors, Lorens Löwenhielm, leaves disappointed; learning from this religious family that “earthly love and marriage” are mere illusions, he vows to devote himself to his career and becomes a decorated general. Another, Achille Papin, a famous Parisian opera singer, discovers a great musical talent in Filippa, but he too is rebuffed.

Later, as war envelops Paris and families are torn asunder, Papin sends a friend, Babette, to live with the family he still admires. A devastated Babette, who has endured the murder of her family, begins work as a cook, preparing the simple meals the sisters insist upon eating. A series of fortuitous events make it possible for Babette to prepare a feast for the entire community. The sisters wish to commemorate the anniversary of their father’s founding of their religious community, a community lately afflicted by “testy and querulous” disagreements. What they have in mind is a “modest supper followed by a cup of coffee.” Plans change, however, when Babette wins the French lottery and has 10,000 francs at her disposal. She persuades the sisters to let her prepare a French feast. In a humorous set of scenes, wine and live sea turtles arrive; the sisters suffer nightmares and confess to their religious brethren that they may have “exposed” everyone to “evil powers” and a “witches’ Sabbath.”

It looks at this point as if the stage is set for an evening of quiet misunderstanding, an evening in which the splendors of the senses will be wasted on a community that identifies religious asceticism with a state of disembodied detachment. But another chance event, the last-minute arrival in town of General Löwenhielm alters the chemistry of the meal. His presence means not only that there will be twelve at the meal but also that a person of cultivation will enjoy, and comment on, Babette’s feast.

The general is the first to sense the transforming effects of the feast, as he marvels at the quality of the food and the wine. Here the meal is an occasion for the most human and most philosophical of passions: wonder. The dinner is at first characterized by comic incongruity between the general’s comments and the non sequitur responses from the other members of the dinner party. At one point, a woman, who had earlier described the human tongue as a source of “unleashed evil,” sips her wine as she speaks innocently of how much she is enjoying the “lemonade.”

The film completely transcends our popular way of framing the debate over appetite, which pits a repressive Puritanism against a celebration of the indulgence of untutored desire. If the religious views of this community are in many ways shallow and repressive, the film’s corrective consists not in a repudiation of religion as oppressive. Instead, the film makes clear that bodily goods and sensible pleasures can be vehicles for the manifestation of grace, occasions of communal transformation. The feast achieves what the sisters’ attempts at moral and religious reform could not; it brings about reconciliation as warm memories of the departed founder flow forth in speeches from those assembled.

As the general recounts famous meals at the Parisian restaurant, Café Anglais, where the renowned chef was a woman (Babette, of course!) with a gift for transforming dinner into a love affair that weds spiritual and bodily appetite, he offers an education in the way sensible things can be vehicles of spiritual realities and meals can be foretastes of heaven. If his words are lost on his dining companions, they need not be on us. Viewing this film...provides a glimpse of the remarkable scope of the drama of redemption and of the way in which art, like food, can be a vehicle for the expression of the most profound of spiritual realities.