With its moments of low-key culinary joy, the Danish gem offers a vital recipe for unity in times of austere hardship
At a time when basic grocery shopping is a military operation and many people’s incomes have been cut, an invitation to watch others eat a seven-course meal including caviar, foie gras and truffles might seem a bit rich, in more than one sense of the word. However, despite the incongruous luxuriousness of its eponymous climatic meal, Gabriel Axel’s 1987 masterpiece Babette’s Feast is the ideal lockdown movie.
Most of the film shows how the puritanical Danish Lutherans in the film lived before they sat down to turtle soup, blinis and quail in puff pastry. Life for them is a lot more austere than it is for most of us now. Many depend on the local equivalent of food banks: the meal delivery service provided by the two devout sisters Martine and Filippa. Pasta, tinned meat and UHT milk is manna from heaven compared with the stale bread porridge they gratefully wolf down.
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