Babette’s Feast, released in 1987, was the first Danish submission to win the Oscar for best foreign language film and it’s the subject of Julian Baggini’s recent book in the BFI Film Classics series, a short, engaging essay on the film that won’t take you much longer to read than the film’s running time.
Babette’s Feast is based on a short story by Karen Blixen, best known as the author of Out of Africa. It’s set in the 19th century an austere part of northern Denmark in an equally austere Christian community, into which comes Babette, once a celebrated Parisian chef, now fleeing the counter-revolutionary violence of the Paris Commune in 1871.
When Babette comes into some money and declares she wants to cook a ‘real French dinner’ for the community, it causes both anticipation and trepidation at what to make of such a worldly, gustatory pleasure. What could have been merely a pointed satire on the rigidity of a certain kind of religious life or a gentle culture-clash comedy, is, Julian suggests, something much deeper and much more thought-provoking: an example of film as philosophy. In the interview, we discuss what he means by that…