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Critics Consensus: No consensus yet.
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Critic Consensus: No consensus yet.
View All Babette's Feast (Babettes Gæstebud) News
All Critics (26) | Top Critics (1) | Fresh (25) | Rotten (1) | DVD (2)
The acting is impeccable and the ambience suffused with delicate charm, but overall this doesn't aim at anything higher than Masterpiece Theatre or a Merchant-Ivory film.
essentially a fable ... stands the test of time
a simple film of great feeling and generosity
Babette's offering is a ritual sacrifice, intended to encourage the austere characters with the possibility that their material nourishment may provide spiritual sustenance as well.
While Babette's Feast is bleak, and often ponderous and stony, it eventually resolves as a moving hymn to art.
It's a flawless adaptation of the story Isak Dinesen (pseudonym of Karen Blixen) wrote for a bet that she could be published in the popular middlebrow Saturday Evening Post.
The film began something of a vogue for food as an emblem of love in the cinema, but nothing has equalled it. Resist it if you can.
Light, frothy and sweet on the tongue, but lacking nutrition.
Twenty-five years on, the story is still charming and beguiling.
Melancholy bliss.
Still good enough to eat.
Audran is luminous as the centre of a gentle, generous film about grace. Oh, and grub.
This sublime ode to art, gift, love and grace should be remembered for its wonderful direction and a magnificent narrative that never ceases to surprise us with what it has to offer and the unbelievable amount of depth that it holds in every detail of its apparently simple story.
Super Reviewer
This film really moved me when I first saw it many years ago. I just rewatched it and I think that I enjoyed it even more this time around. On the surface it is a very simple film, but the currents that run below the surface are very deep and complex. The film is beautiful, sad, depressing, inspiring and heartwarming all at once. It is made all the more powerful by the wonderfull acting and beautifull cinematography. A true classic in every sense of the word.
Set in a rugged fishing village in 1871 Denmark, shows the impact of a French housekeeper (Stephane Audran) on two pious sisters who carry on their late father's work as pastor of a dwindling religious flock. Danish director Gabriel Axel's understated but finely detailed work centers on the preparation and consumption of an exquisite Gallic meal, a sensuous labor of love which has a healing effect on the austere sect and the Frenchwoman who prepared it. This film has so much power and warmth.
One of the longest hour and forty minute films I've ever sat through. The movie wasn't primarily my cup of tea (ha!), but I respect certain aspects of it's storytelling ability and it's skill for fleshing its chief characters out masterfully. It's an extremely slow, and often boring movie, but its one that does have some good elements to it. Just not enough for me to say it's totally worth one's time - only if you're really into food, then this might be the movie for you, might be.
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