Babette’s Feast

In Brief: While it's not exactly to my taste (pun intended), I can certainly appreciate why Danish writer-director Gabriel Axel's Babette's Feast took home the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 1988. Axel's adaptation of, Isak Dinesen's story (Dinesen being a pseudonym for Karen Blixen) of a French refugee confronted with the Puritanical strictures of her involuntarily adopted Danish community is replete with the sort of aggrandizement of art through metaphor that Academy voters have always loved. The metaphor here is food, as the title would imply, but this is really a film about the conflict between repression and sensual indulgence with a distinctly Scandinavian streak of nihilism. It's a beautiful film in many regards — but for my money, if I'm in the mood for a nihilistic feast featuring Stéphane Audran, I'd prefer the aborted meals of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.