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Contents © 2000
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

Babette's Feast

Directed by Gabriel Axel, Starring Stephane Audran, 1987, 102 minutes, Color, Denmark. Danish and French with English subtitles. Available at Hollywood Video

Ernie: The congregation decides that even if the food isn't austere they're attitude toward it will be. But the beauty of the feast infuses itself into their little meeting and restores a warmth of feeling toward each other which they had lost.

Matthew: Through Babette's act of love, grace has entered them all.

Ernie: And it culminates in all of them joining hands around the well in the town square and singing a hymn under the stars. Normally they would have considered that an unseemly public spectacle. It was such a Mediterranean Catholic thing to do.

Matthew: The general experiences a kind of miracle too. When he first visits as a young man, he has a vision of a new life free of the sins of his youth with Martina. When he fails to win, her he adopts a life not really his own. "I wish I could be like you," he says to a fellow officer, "I will devote myself entirely to my career." But after he experiences this amazing dinner in this barren place, he concludes that he was wrong, that "nothing is impossible." What he recovers is a life of love instead of a life of ambition.