Babettes gæstebud (1987)

Second viewing; first viewed on June 4, 1989

English title: Babette's Feast

Based on a short story by Karen Dinesen, first published in 1958

Two sisters living in a remote fishing village are discouraged from marrying by their possessive father. In their elder years, they take a French refugee woman as a servant.

On Wikipedia, it says that its diretor changed the setting from that of the story so it would not look too 'touristy'. I find that funny, because this is a film which I appreciated mostly as an aesthetical succession of images. There is hardly any imagination in the mise-en-scène, and the text itself I found somewhat poor, relying as it does on clichés about both Nordic people and French ones. Reportedly, this is Jorge Bergoglio's favorite movie. It figures that the Court Jester of the Catholic Church should choose a Protestant movie as his personal pick. It also makes sense that a film which celebrates the pleasures of the flesh, albeit not the sexual ones, should find resonance in someone who is forced into perpetual celibacy by his own faith. He probably was also moved by the film's refugees-as-vibrancy message. In Brazil, this film was a great success amid the middle class, probably because it is a womanly film.

Rating: 50 (down from 59)