Asheville Movie Guys are proud to join the Movies & Meaning Festival this year as sponsors. Movies & Meaning takes place Feb. 21-23, at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts. Find out more at moviesandmeaning.com. Readers of AshevilleMovies.com get 25% off the full weekend registration price with the discount code MOVIES25.

As a preview of the festival, AshevilleMovies.com is happy to share this piece on the classic film Babette’s Feast, the festival’s opening selection, by Movies & Meaning founder Gareth Higgins.

A Sacrament of Interruption

Babette’s Feast (Gabriel Axel, 1987)
by Gareth Higgins

Eating in movies is often portrayed as a sacrament, and this is how it should be. The best of sacramental food films is Babette’s Feast, a Danish film about a religious sect that has lost the meaning of the words it has come to worship.

(We’ll be screening Babette’s Feast at the weekend-long Movies & Meaning Festival, taking place in Asheville from Friday, Feb. 21, to Sunday, Feb.23 — and there’s a pre-weekend workshop on the Thursday and Friday too. Find out more at moviesandmeaning.com For now — back to Babette’s Feast.)

The members of the sect live on a cold, isolated island, where the weather never seems to stray beyond offering different shades of gray wetness. Their regular meetings are facilitated by two women, daughters of the now deceased pastor who was “greatly respected and perhaps a little feared.”

His followers meet to honor their founder, even though he has long since gone. Their hymns sound like particularly sharp fingernails scratching slate, and include hopeful phrases not far from “Only when we have achieved sinless perfection will God dwell with us.” Sister Act this ain’t.

Flashbacks reveal that the pastor would not let his daughters marry the men they loved because he needed them to help run the sect. This horrifying example of how well-meaning religious people sometimes damage others by using them according to what they think they need for their own calling should be a wake up call. However, the film makes it clear that the pastor was trying to love his children in the only way he knew how; perhaps we need to be more forgiving of our parents.

Members of the sect greet each other with words like “Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and delight shall kiss each other,” but they seem to take pleasure in the words without ever experiencing their meaning. A soldier visits the island and tells the daughters of his experience at the Royal Palace — “Piety was fashionable at court,” he says.

And into their midst comes an outsider — Babette (played with fierce grace by Stéphane Audran), who has fled from France with nothing but her memories and culinary skill. She has lost everything in the wars and is broken and alone. The daughters take her in — again revealing the warmth of community and self-giving that only a true appreciation of what it means to be human can give.

She stays with them for over a decade, helping around the house, providing the Dickensian gruel that they seem content to eat; and then one day a letter arrives. She has won the lottery — 10,000 francs — and the daughters are heartbroken because they assume this means she will leave them to return to her true home in France.

But she asks if they would let her cook them a meal. They consent, and the whole sect is invited. As the preparations for the meal develop, the sect members suspect the worst: the food seems colorful, exotic even. Dangerously worldly. The audience sees the most incredible edibles — strange pastries, awe-inspiring fruit, and, in a very politically incorrect move, a live turtle — and our mouths water.

Meanwhile, the sect members develop a creeping sense of fear that “the world, the flesh, and the devil” have intruded upon their lives. They have nightmares of the food sending them to hell and live in fear of anything different to what they know. When the meal finally happens, the sect has agreed to stiffen its resolve; to sit upright, not to have eye contact with the food, and, at all costs, NOT TO ENJOY A SINGLE BITE. But, as they say, what happens next will amaze you…

I won’t spoil it — so join us at Movies & Meaning for an experience of watching one of the greatest of films in one of the loveliest environments, in community with like-minded people.

This is a fable, and like all the best fables, it tells the truth about what it means to be human. It’s a parable of grace, of course; and even the hardest heart will melt when all is said and done. But it is more than just the story of one woman’s love for people who have been ungrateful. It is really about what Martin Luther meant when he said that to be a Christian was to “Love God and sin boldly.” The sect members are so trapped in the past that when freedom is offered to them — literally — on a plate, one of their number initially responds by saying “I’m fearful of my joy.” Their terror of the unknown and guilt for the past has left them doomed to only repeat words that have been dead for generations.

Even the soldier is filled with regret — he abandoned his love for the army, where he rose through the ranks and had an “honorable” career. But now, reminded of his love, he asks, “Could many years of victory be seen as a defeat?”

Babette introduces the one ingredient — I know some people might think it’s turtle soup, but it’s actually sacrificial love — that helps them raise their sightline above themselves. In the near-hallucinogenic haze of the food and wine, they discover hidden depths of grace and joy and life within themselves, things that had lain dormant for so long that they may not even remember when they last saw them. (Like Jesus, but unlike many religious ideologies, the film realizes that sometimes too much alcohol can be good for you — especially if your return transport is driven by a horse.)

And, in the moonlight after the meal, they dance, rediscovering not only their childlikeness, but their very humanity. And the reality of a relationship with Love breathes in them again.

Babette’s Feast might cause you to reflect on your own need for a renewing desert experience, or, on the other hand, the need to come out of the desert for a good feed. We have lost our sense of taste, and perhaps that’s the same thing as losing our way.

I asked a radical clergyman once what he thought the solution was to the challenges facing the us in the northern Ireland of my youth, where legalistic stiffness has coexisted with mutual enmity and even violence, although grace has continually broken through. The clergyman said, “The solution is the hard gospel. The hard gospel is not that you don’t say ‘fuck’ or that you don’t sleep with your girlfriend before you’re married. The hard gospel is that you love God and you love your neighbor as yourself. End of story.”

I know that this may rankle with some. And yet, I can’t deny that what my clergy friend said was about as true as a statement can be in a post-modern world. “Little children, love one another.” That’s Babette’s modus operandi. That’s her gift to the dormant community. That’s the hard gospel, and that’s all we need.

Find out more about Movies and Meaning at moviesandmeaning.com.

(Photo: Stéphane Audran in Babette’s Feast. © 1987 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. All Rights Reserved.)