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"Babette's Feast"
By Matthew Prins | "Babette's Feast" is almost everything I would want a
religious movie to be: deliberate, reverent, thoughtful,
and dogmatically sound. It's no wonder it made the famed
Vatican's
List O' Fourty-Five. The easiest modern comparison is
"Chocolat," but while Hallstrom's sad little film uses
indulgence in food to discuss intolerance, "Babette's
Feast" uses indulgence in food to discuss, well, how God
feels indulgence. The point director Gabriel Axel is
making -- and it's a good one -- is that when we are offered
pleasure on earth, there are times when it is appropriate
to take and enjoy it. (There is an implicit corollary in
"Babette's Feast" that "Chocolat" omits: There are also
times when it is appropriate to abstain.)
Let's get back to that word "deliberate" for a moment,
though. The eponymous feast takes up about 30 minutes of
screentime -- ending about 10 minutes from the end of the
film -- during which three things happen: people eat food,
one man lauds the food constantly, and the other people at
the table slowly progress from not caring how the food
tastes to loving it. (The reason that progression is
necessary is a spoiler, so I'll not mention it.) I
simultaneously applaud Axel's choice to show that
progression is rarely immediate and lament that it's
dramatically tedious to slowly show people slowly
progressing without something cinematically exciting to
keep the audience interested. Gotta hate that a stupid
winning lottery ticket is the catalyst for it all, too.
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