Title: Babette's Feast: Feasting with Lutherans.
Source: Antioch Review, Summer92, Vol. 50 Issue 3, p551, 16p
Author(s): Podles, Mary Elizabeth
Abstract: Presents an essay on the motion picture `Babette's Feast,' based on a short story by Isak Dinesen. Evocation of Scandinavian painting throughout the film; Plot; Variation from Dinesen's story.

BABETTE'S FEAST: FEASTING WITH LUTHERANS

At the time she wrote "Babette's Feast," Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) was in the late stages of the syphilis she had contracted from her husband, and knew herself to be near death. Her digestive system had been destroyed by the disease, and, in intense pain and unable to eat, she dictated her story as she literally starved to death. Yet still she could write "Babette," a parable of a sumptuous superfluity of food and of the sacrifices an artist makes to give of herself and her art. Gabriel Axel's Babette's Feast (Babbette's Gastebud, 1987), an expansion of the story into film, partakes of the same artistry. Numerous critics compare the visual effects of Axel's film to painting in an attempt to capsulize its force and flavor. Typical are Tom O'Brien's observations in Commonweal. the Lutheran minister resembles "a dour portrait of John Calvin," his daughters are called "pre-Raphaelite-looking," and the cool bluish tone of Axel's color scheme "looks as if Vermeer had painted it." Frederic Strauss in Cashiers du cinema refers to the film's "atmosphere pointilliste." Babette's Feast clearly suggests even to those who are not art historians a debt to painting. Indeed, the film recapitulates the main currents of Scandinavian painting, a recapitulation that is part of Gabriel Axel's synthesis of the deepest themes of Danish culture--folk, European, and Lutheran.

For a director to allude to painting in a film is not a new development. First, paintings are often "quoted" in film for the sake of the power of the image borrowed. Whether the audience recognizes the image is almost irrelevant. Its form and composition carry their own force. But further, film, a younger child in the family of the visual arts, sometimes seeks to validate its own worth by using the techniques of its more respected elder siblings Just as painters of the Renaissance self-consciously held themselves up for comparison to the art of the antique, so filmmakers frequently make reference to the older, comparable art of painting, hoping or assuming that an intelligent audience will see the superior advantages of the newer idiom. Thus the tableaux vivants of Carnival in Flanders (Jacques Feyder, 1935), while not the point of the film, add to the general drollery, tickle the knowledgeable viewer's appreciation of seventeenth-century painting, and make valid, if mocking, points of comparison concerning composition, framing, and their impact on narrative in the two media, film and painting. A Sunday in the Country (Bernard Tavernier, 1984) pulls joke after in-joke on us, as the elderly painter-hero ruminates on his failure of courage in not pursuing the avantgarde avenues of nineteenth-century painting, while his life is shown as a series of visions of contemporary painting come alive. Frame after frame of Monet, Degas, Carriere, Van Gogh parade across the screen, to the delight of art historians in the audience. There is little in the way of plot to impede their enjoyment.

Babette's Feast continues this film tradition by referring to nineteenth-century Scandinavian painting to evoke and explain the complexity of Danish culture, to which the film is a conscious homage. Recent scholarship, notably Kirk Varnedoe's Northern Lights (1988) and the Kunstmuseum Dusseldorf's Im Lichte des Nordens (1986), is working towards the establishment of a corpus and definition of nineteenth-century Scandinavian painting both as a facet of cosmopolitan European culture and as an indigenous phenomenon born of the distinctive and evocative Nordic light.

Babette's Feast is a sophisticated European film with a decided flavor of Denmark and a deceptive simplicity, an amalgam like the paintings it imitates. The evocation of Scandinavian painting throughout the film is more than a nod to art historians and more than a validation of the artistic importance of the film medium. It helps Axel to explore his own culture as an expression of the deepest levels of artistic and human yearnings. Axel invokes not only painting but also literature, music, humor, and Lutheran theology to make his statement about life, art, and the nature of grace.

Gabriel Axel's literary connection is the most obvious. Babette's Feast closely follows Isak Dinesen's slight short story of the same name. The plot is simple. A Lutheran minister with two beautiful daughters has gathered a small, intensely pietist flock around him in a fishing village, Norre Vosseberg in Jutland in the film. A young army officer, in trouble for his loose living, is sent to rusticate with an elderly aunt. He visits the pietist community, to which the aunt is devoted, for prayer and proximity to the elder daughter Martine. He leaves her, however, without ever articulating his feelings, tells her only that he has realized that "in this world there are things which are impossible," and determines to cut a brilliant figure in the military and the world.

Subsequently, a French opera singer, Achille Papin, sunk in a profound Danish melancholy during a visit to the village, hears Philippa, the other daughter, singing in her father's congregation. Recognizing the quality of her voice, he gives her singing lessons and promises to make her a prima donna. Though she is attracted to the splendid, erotic world he represents (together they sing Mozart's "Seduction Duet"), she rejects the proffered career--and him.

Years pass. The dean has died; his daughters head the dwindling community in prayer and ministry to the poor. Babette, a Frenchwoman and friend of Papin, is cast up into the village, fleeing from the violence of the Commune. The sisters, though they have lime enough to spare, take her in and give her a position as a cook. Soon they find her indispensable: they, on whom she depended, have become dependent on her.

More years pass. Babette, whose sole remaining contact with France has been a lottery subscription, wins the grand prize of Fr. 10,000. All are saddened by the prospect of her leaving. She asks whether she may cook a real French meal for the community to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the founding dean. The sisters view such a worldly feast with trepidation, but, considering it to be Babette's last request before her departure, they consent. Privately, the brethren agree never to mention, not even to notice or taste the food as they eat.

The dinner convenes, and course after course of beautiful, sumptuous food and wine appears. Babette is a cook of consummate artistry. Under the influence of her art, old bitternesses and recriminations between the brethren are reconciled, old sorrows healed and loves restored, and all made whole again in a transcendent feast. Afterwards, the sisters express their thanks to Babette and their sorrow that she will soon be leaving them. She reveals that she will in fact not return to France, for she has spent all her winnings to provide the feast.

The film varies from Dinesen's story by omitting any reference to Babette as a petroleuse, an incendiary participant in the Communard uprising. In the story, the sisters' suspicion of her role in revolutionary violence increases Babette's depth and mystery. Furthermore, it adds a level of irony to Lowenhielm's climactic dinner speech, in which he recalls the sumptuous meal he had eaten with Gallifet, the general from whom Babette was fleeing, and a further level still when Babette lets it be known that she was indeed the cook of that legendary meal, and that, cruel and oppressive as Galtifet was. she grieves for him as one of the few who understood and appreciated her art. This change the film makes in the original story is an improvement, because it distances Babette's story from the political and particular and gives it a greater universality by focusing it on the relation of art and grace in Babette's story.

Dinesen's story was originally written in English to reach a wider European audience. Axel translates it back into Danish (as Dinesen often did herself), for Danish is a more suitable language for so Danish a story. Dinesen set her story in Norway; Axel moves it back to Denmark. Dinesen's Norwegian setting may have been meant to distance the story a little from her immediate Danish audience, to give it a slight added flavor of the quaint; otherwise, it is so distinctively Danish in its understatement, its irony, humor, and in the constructs of Lutheranism that shape its structure, that it is again an improvement to return it to a Danish setting in the film.

Just as Dinesen's writing is a mix of the cosmopolitan and the specifically Danish, so too are the Scandinavian paintings with which we began this essay, and which are, to an informed eye, so strikingly evoked by the visual imagery of Babette's Feast For example, the close cultural and political ties between Germany and Denmark produced a close resemblance between German Romantic painting and Danish art of the late years of the century. Some of the most compelling images of Babette's Feast are pure German Romanticism: an isolated figure stands against a panoramic background, a solitary individual in the face of cosmic natural forces. Caspar David Friedrich's Traveller Looking over a Sea of Fog is a close parallel: it portrays a single figure seen from behind, atop a mountain spur looking down and outward over a rocky, mist-covered landscape; his face is averted, his response to the mysterious panorama concealed. The young Lowenhielm riding over the dunes, Achille Papin sitting on the headlands, Babette gathering herbs in the meadow: each is framed as the elevated Romantic soul (the lover, the musician, the artistcook) and, within the framework of the story, each one is alone, an outcast of one kind or another, thrown up into the village by apparent chance, there to find connections "in the hidden regions of the heart."

From the isolated figure in the landscape to the solitary figure in the domestic interior is a short step, and there the film reflects another theme of nineteenth-century Danish painting, the Realist study of the single, absorbed, unsentimentalized figure. often a peasant or a woman, painted in a subtle and limited range of color. Painters like the Danish Anna Ancher drew ultimately on the paintings of seventeenth-century Holland and Flanders to create their own versions of the genre painting, and to pay homage to the dignity and authentic quality of the simple rustic life they portrayed. Ancher's painting Lars Gaihede Carving a Stick, for instance, shows a real person known to the artist immersed in his work, oblivious to the artist for whom he sits. In Babette's Feast, the three scenes of the pauper with the soup bowl pay their own homage to Danish art, and at the same time comment with understated Danish humor on Axel's central themes. He is as rough-hewn as Ancher's model, and as absorbed in his food as Lars Gaihede is in carving his stick. First he receives soup from the minister's daughters, who have renounced love and art for good works, then from Babette, who transforms food into grace, and again from the sisters, who have come to recognize what life without Babette would be: his silent "Ptooey," when he gets his ale bread soup instead of the French cooking to which he has become accustomed, speaks volumes. The recipient of the community's charity, with all its limitations, and of Babette's grace, he is both an exponent of and a humorous, unsentimental commentator on the unfolding themes of the film. At the same time, he represents in the film just what Varnedoe finds in Scandinavian genre paintings, a "rural folk . . . as surviving exemplars of a primordial national soul."

Scenes of the sisters with their sewing and of Babette in her kitchen create a high culture counterpart to these rustic genre "paintings" within the film, and make reference to another strain of Scandinavian painting. Artists like Harriet Backer made a specialty of the single female figure engaged in some mundane task (sewing, for example) in a simple interior often bathed in transforming light effects (lamplight, sunlight diffused from a window in another room). Varnedoe characterizes Backer's paintings as creating "a mood of silence and suspension" and an air of mystery recalling the work of the Belgian Symbolists; in her painting By Lamplight he points out that the "mysterious effects of night on familiar domestic spaces . . . enhance the inaccessibility and introspection of her female subjects." Babette is portrayed in this way as she prepares the dinner, and immediately afterwards, just before she makes her final statement concerning artistry and grace: her concentration and absorbed occupation subsumed in the warm lamplight and firelight give her a solitary, transcendent quality, like a living Vermeer.

Gabriel Axel bases his generic types, the rustic and the sophisticated, on recognizable types of Scandinavian genre paintings, but not necessarily on specific paintings. In one instance, however, he seems to refer to a more specific source. The recurring scenes of the faithful of the pietist community may well be based on Niels Bjerre's well-known (in Scandinavia) painting The Prayer Meeting, Harboore (The Children of God), which represents members of the Home Mission evangelical movement gathered around a table for prayer. Bjerre's picture shows six figures around a table in a small room seen from a low-angled perspective and lit from a window at the left: the raking light, the subtle range of color harmonies, the sharp focus on the members' individuated, rather homely faces are quoted almost verbatim in Babette's Feast. There are more subtle resemblances, too. Bjerre's painting is fraught with ironies, for the beliefs and practices of the Home Mission brought about disharmony and fragmentation in the larger community of Harboore not the Christian unity it sought to foster. Nor was unity within the Home Mission community easily attained: Bjerre, Northern Lights contends, "acutely aware of the emotional contradictions implicit in religious conversion, recorded The Prayer Meeting with keen psychological insight. His six figures are suspended in individual, self-absorbed reveries that undercut their religious collectivism." It should be obvious why Axel chose this painting as a source for his depiction of Dinesen's pietist brethren, who "were even becoming somewhat querulous and quarrelsome, so that sad little schisms would arise in the congregation."

Repetitions of the scene based on Bjerre's picture structure the framework of Babette's Feast. Early scenes with the dean and his daughters explain the premise of the community; it is at prayer meetings that Lowenhielm recognizes and renounces his "impossible" love for Martine, and to which Philippa returns after Papin's departure. It is during prayer meetings that we see the "sad little schisms" erupt: the lumber deal gone wrong, the slanderous women, the guilty lovers, and it is in the final, culminating repetition of the scene, the climactic and transforming feast itself, that all the conflicts are resolved. The ironic, the conflicting, and the dissonant elements of Bjerre's painting in the end resolve into the congruent, consonant, harmonious wholeness of Axel's redaction.

The mystical and religious themes in Babette's Feast are themselves an oblique reflection of another prevailing strain in nineteenth-century Scandinavian painting, and they are apparent in the visual imagery of the film too. Paintings of the Scandinavian Symbolists reflect a deep interest in mystical, supernatural, and cosmic themes, and with their difficult representation. A double strain of influences feeds into Scandinavian Symbolist Imagery. First, the cosmopolitan French plein-airistes imparted an impressionist concern with the special effects of light and air, which Scandinavian painters adopted to explore the luminous effects produced by living so close to the Arctic Circle. The best-known and most striking of these are the "blue painters," who specialized in the mauveblue palette of the long, long Nordic twilight. The painting Summer Evening or' the South Beach at Skagen by Peder Severin Kroyer is perhaps the most familiar example of this genre: it is the one reproduced on the Danish butter-cookie tin.

Scenes from Babette's Feast are shot through with painterly effects like the blue painters', particularly in the first half of the film. The twilit haze of the aunt's house and its blue-and-white French Classical decoration recall the porcelain of Bing and Grondahl as much as they recall Kroyer and scenes of fishermen on the beach, and the flat planes and white houses of the village in varying lights reflect their debt to turn-of-the-century painting.

But Scandinavian painters were not long content with simply recording the effects of light on their native countries. The position of the Nordic land so close to the pole seems to have created a special relationship between its inhabitants and the sun. Even today, the winter solstice (St. Lucy's Day in the Gregorian calendar) and Midsummer Night are major feast days in Scandinavia. The disappearance and return of the sun are charged with more emotional force than we recognize in our temperate climates, and it was that very intensity that informed the Symbolist strain of Scandinavian painting at the end of the last century. Where the Impressionists had sought non-subjects, neutral subjects that did not impede the appreciation of pure light, color, and the application of paint, the Symbolists deliberately sought to embody the mythic, the mystical, the dream image, the expression of a spiritual, inner truth. Emotion, intuition, and the otherworldly demanded expression in otherworldly, nonnaturalistic light, heightened color, and a subjective distortion of form. Color was charged with its own symbolism and private significance, as was light itself.

The Symbolist urge in Scandinavia is perhaps most forcefully represented in the paintings of the Norwegian Edvard Munch, whose strident colors, patterned abstraction, simplification of form, and peculiar effects of light give form to an urgent psychic force. Munch's paintings have had a significant influence on Scandinavian film. For example, the three sisters in Bergman's Cries and Whispers (1973), in their dresses of red, white, and black, closely parallel Munch's Dance of Life and are, in fact, a close analogue of his concept of the three stages of life.

Nothing in Babette's Feast is so specific a parallel to any Symbolist painting, yet its debt to the Symbolists cannot be gainsaid. It evokes the Symbolists' vision of the mystical and otherworldly. While a film about earthly things, food and the relations between sisters, friends, and lovers, it deals also with the unearthly and transcendent, and evokes deeply felt emotional states through the simplest means. As the film progresses and its themes develop, Symbolist references proliferate. The symbolic weight given to light and color are as powerful as in any turn-of-the-century painting. The gradual warming of Axel's palette parallels the warming of the cold and puritanical world of the pietist community and the fishing village. At the opening of the film, the village is a cold, bleak, blue-gray place. The red-gold of the sisters' hair rings like a single gleam of warmth throughout the opening scenes, in which the stage is set for their renunciations of worldly love and art.

We next see the sisters faded to gray. The village is even bleaker and grayer in stormy weather, and cast up out of the storm comes Babette with her warm chestnut hair. Throughout the rest of the film, warm colors associate with Babette as she gradually warms her newfound home. The scene mentioned above, of Babette gathering herbs, is lit by a warm red sunrise. When she returns with supplies for the feast, she comes home in the same early sunrise glow, which paints the white walls of the village a pale peach. With her comes her familiar for the remainder of the film, the sailor boy with red hair.

In his wheelbarrow the boy in turn brings the monstrous tortoise, a Symbolist phantasm if ever there was one: not so horrific as Redon's grinning spiders nor so grotesque as John Bauer's trolls, still it represents the demonic force the sisters fear they have unleashed by consenting to the meal. The dream image, beloved of the Symbolists, takes cinematic form in Martine's dream: the beckoning woman, the monster turtle, the fire, and the spilled wine are all typical of the unnamed portents of Scandinavian Symbolist painting like Munch's. It is a tribute to Axel's delicacy of touch that the spilling of a chalice of wine seems like an unbearable act of violence. Fire, with its primitive symbolic values, appears (apart from candle flames) for the first time in Martine's dream; henceforward it is Babette's element as she prepares for the feast.

As the dinner itself nears, the increasing warmth of the color scheme parallels and symbolizes the diners' correspondence to the grace poured out upon them. As they "feel their hearts strangely warmed," the film's colors warm. First Babette and her hired boy lay the table with pale peach linen. As the general prepares to meet his former beloved and make his peace with his younger self, he buttons on a blue uniform jacket with a brilliant red revere over his heart: it recurs like a scarlet exclamation mark throughout the dinner. As the feast progresses and more and more wines are served, the glasses glow like rubies on the table, and bring an advancing rosy glow to the diners' cheeks and lips. The food, which distracted most reviewers to the swooning point, is a still life of magical glowing color.

At the end of the dinner. as the guests leave, their sins forgiven and their sorrows healed? they join hands in the starlight and dance in a ring around the village well, in a scene that might well be taken from a Symbolist painting. The simplest and most familiar objects and the most ordinary and mundane gesture (the joining of hands) take on a power of suggested meaning any Symbolist might have envied. The natural and the supernatural meet in a single summary statement. The well speaks of grace, the stars of the heavenly realm; the ring dance, a folk element of the type beloved of nineteenth-century Nordic painters, suggests that its participants have touched eternity (the ring has no beginning and no end) in the presence of grace. The dancers re-create in the North the movement of Dante's circular journey in the South that led him to "the love that moves the sun and the other stars."

This last scene amply demonstrates that Gabriel Axel used Symbolist imagery for the same reasons Symbolist painters did. The visual arts can express ineffable states obliquely, evoke rather than explain them, and thereby strike the inner chords that reverberate in the heart and the hidden regions of the mind. Mere objective observation and intellectual explanation cannot carry the force of the intuitions of the heart that are the subjects of the Symbolists paintings, and of Axel's film. Axel's imagery is effective for the same reasons Symbolist painting is effective: they both breathe a new life into old images (light, for instance, has always been a metaphor for the divine presence in Christian art), permitting the investigation of deep human truths in suggestive form without the tedium of lengthy explication. That, for better or worse, is the realm of the critic.

Just as Axel makes reference to painting to express, develop, and reinforce his thematic material, so too he interweaves strands of musical imagery through the film as a developing commentary on the relationships of life and art. The little hymn tune, for example, that the members of the community sing in the church and in their prayer meetings recurs like a leitmotif at significant moments throughout the film, and each time it takes on an-additional layer of meaning. Each verse comments, often ironically, on the situation of which it forms a material part. For instance, in the introductory scenes of the father, his two daughters and their village suitors, the puritanical dean robs the sisters of the chance for married happiness with the apparently holiest of motives: "Would you rob me of my right and left hands?" The congregation sings, "What father would give his child a stone if he asked for bread?" Nothing more needs to be spelled out about the manipulative relation of this father to his children.

The same hymn tune takes on a further importance in the story of Martine's relationship to Lorens Lowenhielm. The pietists sing it at prayer meetings, a cappella and never strictly in tune, while Lowenhielm sits mute, struggling to reconcile his love for Martine with his conflicting ambitions in the military and the world. He cannot reconcile them; he chooses the world, and further chooses to shut out his conflicting emotions and pursue worldly success with a vengeance. The lush, romantic strains of the Brahms waltz he dances at court with the queen epitomize the path he has chosen: sophisticated, seductive, sensuous, but with a hint of underlying sadness, it stands in sharp contrast to the sparseness of the hymns of Norre Vosseberg. In the presence of such music, the pious platitudes Lowenhielm mouths to the queen, the ones he learned in Jutland, seem charming and piquant, for "at that time piety was fashionable at the court."

But Lowenhielm and his story are not ended, nor has he finished with the hymn, the waltz, or the things they represent. Returning to Norre Vosseberg, he wishes to put to rest once and for all his younger self's interior conflict, and by dominating the dinner party at the sisters', to prove to himself that he had indeed chosen rightly. He does not get what he expected. Instead, overwhelmed by the community's apparently nonchalant acceptance of Babette's outpouring, he comes to recognize the workings of grace. The little hymn recurs throughout the dinner, framing Lowenhielm's speech and punctuating the scenes of reconciliation that follow. Lowenhielm, in his own reconciliation with Martine, has come to recognize the truth of the commonplaces about grace that he uttered so charmingly at court, and so feelingly at dinner. As he makes his tender speech to Martine, just the chords of the Brahms waltz echo behind his words. All things have become possible: he is reconciled not only with her but with his younger self, and even his selfish and worldly choices represented by the Brahms are finally made whole and right in grace.

If music is an incidental in Martine's story, it is an essential metaphor in Philippa's. It is her voice, raised in the same hymn, that attracts Papin from afar, and her music that opens to her the possibility of a life dedicated to art (specifically, to music) with all that it entails. Philippa's lessons with the very worldly, and worse, popish, Papin reveal to her the element of the erotic contained in art. As she sings the duet from Don Giovanni with Papin, her father sits silent and distressed at the dining table, holding fast to Martine's hand. As they finish the duet and Papin kisses her, Philippa seals her fate: she recognizes, and renounces, the world that music offers her. The last we see, or rather hear, of Papin is his rollicking song stopping abruptly as he reads Philippa's letter, followed by her father's silent smile of wordless satisfaction.

After that, Philippa makes no more music, except to join in the communal hymn singing, and once in connection with Babette. After Babette has won the lottery, she walks alone on the beach and looks out to sea, away from Norre Vosseberg. Perhaps she is contemplating a return to France, or perhaps the spending of her fortune on the one great meal. In either case, the chords Philippa plays on the spinet sound plaintively behind the scene, suggesting the deep connections of the heart between Babette and the two sisters, particularly Philippa, who like Babette has the interior dispositions of the artist and recognizes them in her.

A counterpoint to this scene of Babette's, in which she may be debating her return home, occurs towards the end of the dinner: the brethren sing a verse of their signature hymn which ends with the words "so that our true home we shall find," and Axel cuts directly to Babette in the kitchen. She, though the audience does not yet know it, has renounced all hope of a return to her home in France and her home will now always be the alien land of Denmark. Yet her real "true home" is the transcendent realm of the artist. Philippa alone recognizes Babette's true nature, and, in embracing Babette, echoes the words Papin addressed to Philippa in his letter: "How you will enchant the angels."

Critics have not noted the feminist implications of Axel's film, and its exploration of the relationships between the three women and those who impinge on their world. Perhaps the characteristically Danish rhetorical device of understatement, litotes, has done its work too well. As did Dinesen in her story, so Axel in his film uses a deadpan, minimalist technique that conveys the sparseness of the world of Norre Vosseberg and (more importantly) evokes grand cosmic themes by means of infinitesimal details. Sometimes a single word expresses an entire relationship, or a set of relationships. For example, the youthful Philippa in her nightgown asks Martine with studied casualness whether she ever thinks of that silent young man who arrived so suddenly and just as suddenly vanished. Martine, already in bed, turns her head away on the pillow and sums up her sadness her intimate and truthful relations with her sister, and her deepest feelings about Lowenhielm in her answer: "Ja."

Sometimes less than a word accomplishes even more: Axel achieves the ultimate in understatement when an important theme is expressed in nothing at all. Babette, in encountering salt cod and alebrod, a soup made of stale bread softened to a pulp with ale, becomes suddenly devoid of any facial expression whatever. The result is more eloquent than any grimace or flicker of expression might have been. The audience provides its own grimaces as Martine concocts her mush with great solicitude. Babette's own deadpan reveals the level of her own restraint and her profound acceptance of the circumstances she has been given. Similarly, the guarded look the sisters exchange, and their blankness in the face of the news about Babette's lottery win, speak more decidedly about the bonds of acceptance and love between the three women than any amount of expostulation would have done.

Axel's use of understatement is frequently inextricable from another rhetorical device he favors: irony, much beloved of the sardonic Danes. Often subtle, and resistant to being dissected by the blunt tools of the critic, Axel's irony hinges on the contrast and juxtaposition of appearance and reality, of expectation and fulfilment, of perception and truth. No one is strictly as he appears, no one gets exactly what he expects from his choices. The pietists eschew worldly illusions for an ascetic religious life, but find real religious experience in Babette's very earthly food and spirituous drink. Their feast itself is fraught with delicate irony and contrasts: the sacred is always juxtaposed to the profane. The talk at dinner is all pious commonplaces while the eating and drinking are comically, innocently gluttonous. The one old lady's disappointment when a glass of water turns out to be in fact, water, and not another new and exciting treat, is a marvel.

Lowenhielm sets out to justify his worldly success and finds his heart has truly been with Martine in Jutland all along. He expects to dominate the dinner party in his dashing uniform, and instead finds himself overwhelmed by it. He wishes at last to speak with force and vigor in the dean's house, as he never could as a young man, and finds, as he speaks, that he hardly knows what he is saying, and is carried along apparently by inspiration.

Papin, when he writes to Philippa, imagines that she has renounced her career for marriage and a happy family. Instead she has led a lonely life. He, whose career has brought him the fame he sought for her, is as alone as she, and imagines she has chosen the happier part.

The sisters, in taking Babette in for charity's sake, find themselves the recipient of the far greater gifts of charity and the outpouring of her grace. They have apparently renounced love, and yet it is returned to them in the end a hundredfold. As it was with Lowenhielm, so it is with them: "That which we have chosen is given us, and that which we have refused is, also and at the same time, granted us. Ay, that which we have rejected is poured upon us abundantly."

In Lowenhielm's dinner speech we hear echoes of the Lutheran concept of grace, another central set of themes in Babette's Feast. Grace, for the Lutheran Christian, is an outpouring of unmerited, even unappreciated favor, of transcendent and supernaturally charged existence, raising those who correspond to it to an elevated, transfigured plane. Grace is poured out regardless of the right of the recipient to receive. According to Luther, it is grace that saves the faithful, principally grace as it is granted through the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, the Eucharist.

The Lutheran concept of the Eucharist differs significantly from that of the Roman Church, with implications that reverberate throughout Axel's film. For Luther, the import and effectiveness of the sacrament lay not in the miraculous transubstantiation of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, but in the participants' eating of it:

The sacrament, or outward sign, is in the form of bread and wine . . . although the sign is not simply the form of bread and wine, but the use of the bread and wine in eating and drinking.... For the sacrament, or sign. must be received, or at least must be desired. if it is to work a blessing....

In eating, the participant becomes a partaker in Christ and in the communion of saints:

The significance or purpose of this sacrament is the fellowship of all saints, whence it derives its common name synaxis or communio, that is, fellowship; and communicare means to take part in this fellowship, or as we say, to go to the sacrament, because Christ and all saints are one spiritual body.

The principal effects upon the communicant are first, the forgiveness of sins:

What benefit is such eating and drinking? It is shown us by these words: "Given and shed for you. for the remission of sins"; namely, that in the Sacrament, forgiveness of sins, life and salvation are given us through these words;

the fellowship of all Christians:

by this sacrament all self-seeking love is uprooted and gives place to love which seeks the common good of all, and through this mutual love there is one bread, one drink, one body. one community--that is the true union of Christian brethren;

and a strengthening against death:

.. the bread guides us through death into eternal life.... So entirely is this sacrament intended and ordained to strengthen us against death, and to give us entrance into eternal life (Hugh Thomas Kerr, A Compend of Luther's Theology).

Critics of Babette's Feast, both the story and the movie, have remarked on its eucharistic imagery, but have failed to detect its Lutheran overtones. To most modern critics, all believers look alike. The feast is an image of the eucharistic banquet in all its specifics. It is a memorial feast, in which the memory of one who walked on the frozen waters of the fjord is recalled. From the first the feast is not what anyone expected: its real matter is concealed under another form. Lowenhielm, expecting lowly country fare, finds the most astounding of haute cuisine and fine wine. The brethren, expecting sensuality and wickedness, discover the supreme goodness of the created order. The sisters, expecting to be parted from Babette, find that instead she has made their bond permanent.

Everyone's response to the dinner is a form of correspondence to the sacramental grace of the eucharistic feast, with all of its consequences. The brethren are in fact not fully able to appreciate Babette's cooking beyond the most rudimentary level, as she must know. Still, she gives it to them, regardless of their ability to correspond to it, just as God gives grace. The meal's effect on them is threefold: they are drawn together back into the fellowship that they had lost, they forgive each other their sins and are forgiven, and as they draw near to the end of their lives, they recognize the diminishing of death's significance in the face of eternity. Frederic Strauss, summing up the film, calls it "un conte moderne ou le merveilleux n'a d'autre pouvoir sur la vie que de rendre les echecs, les regrets et la mort plus doux."

Because Lowenhielm, in contrast to the brethren, can recognize the quality of Babette's art, he has the most profound conversion of anyone in the film. In his speech on the nature of grace, he finds and realizes the truth of the old religious commonplaces he has been using to his own advantage. He alone recognizes the abundance of Babette's outpouring, both its quality and, when he asks whether there is any more Clos Vougeot and to his bewilderment is given the rest of the bottle, its sheer quantity. Through this abundant pouring out of grace, Lowenhielm is reunited in blessed communion with Martine, and not only are his sins forgiven, but even his old bad choices are made good, transformed by grace. His own strengthening against death resounds in his final phrase to Martine: "I shall be with you every day that is left to me."

Babette's role in this eucharistic feast is perhaps closer to that of the Roman priest than that of the Lutheran pastor, but her French origins, like Papin's, and her jeweled cross were, one suspects, suspiciously papist to the eyes of Norre Vosseberg. The feminist critic Susan Hardy Aiken compares Babette's feast to a secular Eucharist in which Babette gives up her own woman's body as the communion offering: this perhaps stretches the metaphor, at least as Axel presents it, a little far. The sacrifice she makes, however, is specifically liturgical in several respects. The main course, a witty dish of quails in pastry called cailles en sarcophage, makes reference both to God's miraculous feeding of the Israelites in the desert (a foreshadowing of the Eucharist) and to the three days Christ spent in the tomb after his redemptive sacrifice (memorialized in the Eucharist). Furthermore, Axel may be making subtle reference to the rubrics of the Mass at the end of the feast: Babette is at one point shown drinking up the remains of the wine, as if consuming the remnants of the sacramental species, and at another point washing her hands in a kind of post-communion purification ritual.

Axel's most central theme is the self-donation of the artist. Babette, as the giver of grace through her art, is a parallel to Christ who gives himself through the Eucharist, with all that it entails of the gifts of unity and forgiveness. Parallel to Christ's self-giving in the Lord's Supper is the self-giving of the partakers in communion, the fellowship and mutual aid of the Christian community. Their union with God and the saints, a result of the forgiveness of sins, is brought about in the Eucharist and results in mutual forgiveness of mutual grievances.

The parallel to Karen Blixen, her sufferings, her self-giving, and her art, is inescapable. Finally, Gabriel Axel too must be seen as a model of the artist as self-donor. He carefully interweaves the strands of his native Danish and adopted French cultures, the strands that stand for himself and the environments that formed his personality and his art. His careful and elaborate use of painting, music, literature, theology, and all the aesthetic resources of Scandinavian high and folk culture--a lavish self-donation of the artist-director--evokes the concept of grace. Surely only a small part of the film's audience appreciates the complex detailing of the film and the subtlety of its construction, its evocations of the earthy, the worldly, the unworldly, and the otherworldly, yet none remains unmoved by its artistry. Like the self-giving entailed in the Eucharist, like Babette, Axel seems to measure his gift not by the ability of the recipient to receive, but by the power of the giver to give.

~~~~~~~~

BY MARY ELIZABETH PODLES

Mary Elizabeth Podles is the retired curator of Renaissance and baroque art at the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore. _________________

Copyright of Antioch Review is the property of Antioch Review, Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. Source: Antioch Review, Summer92, Vol. 50 Issue 3, p551, 16p. Item Number: 9604083475