Babette's Feast

Impeccably mounted and played, this is gastro-cinema at its most sensual and intoxicating.

All of this is by way of being the prelude to the film's extended, funny and moving final sequence, a spectacular feast, the preparation and execution of which reveal Babette's secret and the nature of her sustaining glory.

Babette's Feast isn't a fast-moving or flashy film. But it has a subtle charm and a warm humor that stick to your ribs far longer than the usual motion-picture glitz. [4 March 1988, p.21]

This banquet is the glorious finale of Gabriel Axel's Babette's Feast, his handsome, understated adaptation of the Isak Dinesen short story.

Twenty-five years on, the story is still charming and beguiling.

While Babette’s Feast is bleak, and often ponderous and stony, it eventually resolves as a moving hymn to art.

The story’s poignant theme—that love and art retain their beauty even if they can only be indulged once in a lifetime—registers more as an afterthought than as the soul-stirring revelation clearly intended.