Reassuring, satiating piety.

A celebration of art and the artist, but also an autumnal meditation on the nature of life itself, how--although we seldom get what we desire--we often receive compensation for our losses in strange, marvelous ways.

The storytelling during the "how" parts gets mired in prolonged flashbacks, and turns for help to an intrusive and overly necessary narrator. It affords you, through all of that, plenty of time to wish anew that there were an accepted format for cinematic works shorter than feature-length. But the feast itself and the buildup to it are ample rewards for toughing it out.

Makeup is fantastic at aging the characters, but that's about all the praise I can give this. It's not often that a film can be both a sprawling mess as well as utterly simplistic and mundane, but this film manages it by taking paper thin characters, doing nothing with them, and cutting up the sequencing of events. It drags everywhere and it doesn't even seem to have a purpose.

That a film of such beauty, wit and originality only ends in pious self-deceit creates a palpable sadness.

Good lord is this a slow movie. Perhaps it was trying to truly convey the slow life in a slow town in a slow society, but why torture your viewers? Also, it is all too easy to question the climax and why the characters do what they do--but the picture frustratingly asks none of the questions the viewer is dying to have it ask. This results in an ultimately unsatisfying production that is hard to recommend.

Babettes gæstebud

19th Century Joy of Cooking. Babette is a French cook that flees from her home to Danish village. Fun, let alone the joy of food, is not part of village until Babette starts cooking.

Probably the best of the food films. (No, that's not a joke. This actually is really good)

Not awful, but predictable and unsatisfying. Chocolat might be something of a rip-off of this film, but I find it much more charming and likable. The dominant feeling I had during Babette's Feast was that it lacked authenticity. Everything felt staged and predestined, and the period recreation didn't ring true either. The photography was pretty, but only in a postcard sort of way. Also, some of the dishes Babette prepares look truly vile.

The opulent, sensual dinner scene at the end clashes with the grim danish austerity that permeates the rest of the film - I find this whole atmospheric stuff very well rendered. I agree that some of the dishes look "truly vile" as I've read in another comment here, some of them hurting my animal-friendly sensibilities (turtle soup, for one), but it's part of the movie experience that I try not to look at it that way (hell, this is no 'Cannibal Holocaust' after all...)

nice