Thank you! I just checked with my video store and they have a copy so I'm going to pick it up tomorrow. This is totally my kind of movie. I am so looking forward to watching it :) I love foreign films anyway, but this one looks especially appealing.
You'll have to tell me how you like it--I'm pretty well speechless at the moment, but it's wonderful because it's such a simple story, but with such depth at the same time.....
Babette's FeastswimtimerFebruary 10 2008, 03:08:27 UTC
I am happy to hear you like this movie too. I love it. I have a tape of it that is so dark, and I bought a dvd for my mother in law and it was amazing how the detail improved the movie I loved. I have a dvd for myself now and it is a Christmas season tradition to watch. The food and the faith. A really wonderful tale of hardship and beauty and love.
Re: Babette's Feastanahata56February 10 2008, 03:15:18 UTC
What I found most touching about the whole thing was the concept of loving sacrifice.
All through the movie, you see the sisters and their austere life, living that concept of loving sacrifice. And yet, when it came right down to it, Babette did precisely the same thing. The sisters way was gray and bleak, and Babette's way was sumptuous and colorful and rich and beautiful--but it was exactly the same thing.
Acts of sacrifice, lovingly carried out with joy.
Babette gave everything she had to honor her benefactresses, and it brought her such pleasure to do it--not simply because she had the opportunity, once again, to practice her art, but because she was able to do it for women she loved, and to whom she felt she owed everything.
The emotional layers of this story, the mirror reflections to be found in seemingly divergent lives, was just...masterful.
I re-read "Babettes Gæstebud" once a year. It is entirely why I started my research on Frisian food. I realised that a Flemish cook was working for a Danish Event Planner and that's all it took.
The fact of what the feast does is far more important to me than the skill of the cook. That's what I aspire to, to live up to: "At this very moment, he had a mighty vision of a higher and purer life, without creditors' letters or parental lectures... and with a gentle angel at his side."
That is the essence of what hospitality and cooking means to me.
Thank you for being someone else that gets it. But you do that a lot :-)
I couldn't stop thinking about this--about the idea of Babette spending every penny she had, and that she ever would have, really, on the ingredients, and then working to put them together for this master's feast, this meal that would no doubt be the pinnacle gustatorial experience of everyone she served....
I thought about the service, and the served, and I have to say that it gave me a literal thrill to see the general's aunt eating that meal. And all of them, really--watching their cheeks pink up with the wine, and their inhibitions lower at the ingestion of these magical dishes--and then, at the ending, their dance and their song and their embracing of one another, all as a result of Babette's work
( ... )
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I love foreign films anyway, but this one looks especially appealing.
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You'll have to tell me how you like it--I'm pretty well speechless at the moment, but it's wonderful because it's such a simple story, but with such depth at the same time.....
Reply
Reply
All through the movie, you see the sisters and their austere life, living that concept of loving sacrifice. And yet, when it came right down to it, Babette did precisely the same thing. The sisters way was gray and bleak, and Babette's way was sumptuous and colorful and rich and beautiful--but it was exactly the same thing.
Acts of sacrifice, lovingly carried out with joy.
Babette gave everything she had to honor her benefactresses, and it brought her such pleasure to do it--not simply because she had the opportunity, once again, to practice her art, but because she was able to do it for women she loved, and to whom she felt she owed everything.
The emotional layers of this story, the mirror reflections to be found in seemingly divergent lives, was just...masterful.
Reply
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And knowing that she died of malnutrition kind of makes this story all the more poignant.
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The fact of what the feast does is far more important to me than the skill of the cook. That's what I aspire to, to live up to: "At this very moment, he had a mighty vision of a higher and purer life, without creditors' letters or parental lectures... and with a gentle angel at his side."
That is the essence of what hospitality and cooking means to me.
Thank you for being someone else that gets it. But you do that a lot :-)
Reply
I thought about the service, and the served, and I have to say that it gave me a literal thrill to see the general's aunt eating that meal. And all of them, really--watching their cheeks pink up with the wine, and their inhibitions lower at the ingestion of these magical dishes--and then, at the ending, their dance and their song and their embracing of one another, all as a result of Babette's work ( ... )
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