Pop Corn - Cinema&Food: Oscar-winning Gabriel Axel's Babette's Lunch

Cuisine, art and nobility of spirit. And wealth... because a "artist is never poor".
This is what Babettewhen she spends her lottery winnings to prepare a mega-lunch of French cuisine for the people she works for and to whom she feels attached.

The culinary art, manifested in the noblest of expressions, French cuisine, is the subtle thread, but above all the keystone, of a situation that seems unresolved and unsolvable. The director Gabriel Axelinspired by a story by
Karen Blixen, he brings to the stage a small masterpiece of delicate grace and poignant, serene melancholy, which won him the 1987 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

The film is a true masterpiece of authenticity and simplicity of feelings, running through stories, experiences and above all silences and flavours.

The lunch, prepared by Babette for his diners, is the act of extraordinary and genuine gratitude manifested in the service. Preparing a haute cuisine dish is equal to an act of love, with no ulterior motive, no expectations, bestowed so spontaneously in its natural demonstration of gratuitousness.

With extreme skill Babette juggles the cooker, aided by a local young man, and when lunch arrives on the table, it is a riot of extraordinary transalpine dishes. Throughout the meal, from the first course to the last, the twelve diners do not utter a word, to remain true to their puritanical morals, but, from the satisfied expressions on their faces, it is clear how much they have appreciated this artfully crafted gift.

The guests, at the end of the sumptuous banquet, are reconciled spiritually and physically. Harmony finally reigns among them: the tangled histories of all present, which for years and due to the difficulties, especially communication, of life had forced them into complicated situations, suddenly seem to dissolve knots and tensions.

Babette's lunch is a delicately dramatic, choral film, capable of unravelling the experiences of the protagonists with disarming, disenchanted authenticity. It is a film that thrills, that grips the soul, laying bare the fascinating human weakness and the difficulty of communicating and getting close. Yet, in all this, the art of cooking, of preparing, of sharing emotions and sensations through the meal, a tangible, ancestral and daily representation of human love, bursts forth with disarming simplicity.