This weekend, I had to watch Babette’s Feast (1987) for a class. I wasn’t looking forward to it, exactly, but I wasn’t expecting it to be so dull that I almost had to rip my eyes out in self-defense. Can anyone tell me why, other than mass-hysteria brought on my extreme faddism, this thing won an Oscar? Please help, as I have no idea.
Further, does anyone have any sound reason why this film was worth the lives of twelve innocent quails?
Certainly, the story may have made a very nice short subject, but there is a lot of waste here (and I’m not just talking about the food). The first 60 minutes or so has the pace and usefulness of watching the proverbial paint dry, and the last 30 minutes, that of the titular “feast”, has nothing of the aesthetic and sensual flare that it should have had. Filmed with drab colour tones, under lighting roughly the consistency of thin mud, the meal is actually an assault on the eyes, and has all the palatability of day-old cabbage soup made by your granny.
I consider myself a fairly sensitive and intelligent viewer, unimpressed by kung fu moves and major Hollywood explosions (heck, I even appreciated Finding Neverland (2004) for what it was), but, by the end of Babette’s Feast, I was praying that someone would plant a nice FX dirty bomb in the middle of that bloody turtle soup, just for something to watch.
The whole film is weighed down by stilted and just plain bad performances, and made even worse by a complete sense that everyone we are watching has given up on everything in life – the characters and the actors. Even Babette (Stephane Audran), who seems to have no real reason to have done so! Not even at the Last Supper was there such a feeling of impending doom and death. (And I am not convinced that this changes after the meal, as soon as they all sober up.)
(Don’t get me wrong here. I had been worried that Babette would be some twinkly, obnoxious twit a la Amelie (2001) who would wink and simper and bring artificial and nauseating “magic” – a phenomena all too manipulated and never understood by modern filmmakers – into the lives “of all she touches.” The fact that the film pulled back from that is a blessing, but the funeral feel doesn’t actually thrill me, either.)
The only performances worth noting in this stagy, late-night-CBC-quality drawing room soap are those of Erik the serving boy (played by Erik Petersen) and the man who runs the village store (Holger Perfort, I believe). These two actors manage to inhabit their roles and breathe badly needed life into the grey tableaus, and it makes me wish the title of the movie was “Erik and Store Keeper’s Lunch.”
Babette’s Feast is clearly a feast for the eyes of people who love to watch old people eat and would like to see it filmed lovingly for twenty minutes, I’ll concede that. I don’t happen to be one of those. If your appetite isn’t wounded by the shot upon shot of eviscerated animals, then all those unsteady soup spoons hovering over fuzzy old-lady-chins will certainly do it in for good.
We are using this film in the religion and cinematic culture class for which I am a TA, but for the life of me I can’t see why. Not only will it affirm for kids that school is a tedious and painful experience, but this film isn’t even all that useful, religiously. Anything religious in this film is either so doctrinally forced that it becomes a major annoyance, or it is about as subtle as a fifty pound sledge hammer to the temple, so I fail to see how it has an educational value at all.
Beyond its bald attempts at propaganda, it is, plainly put, an ideological mess. First, the whole thing seeks to confirm all of our worst beliefs about the cultishness and hypocrisy of Puritan Christianity, and then it goes in for the real kill! It asks us to read Babette as a female Christ figure – a woman who watched her two elderly employers slog out their guts to feed the poor, but still insists on pissing away ten thousand francs on sacrificial turtles and expensive French wine. This goes far, far beyond Jesus’ acceptance of an anointing from a poor woman (Matthew 26: 6-13). It is obscene.
In the end, Babette does manage to inspire much jubilance amongst a group of dour, pleasure-starved Lutherans. Big deal! She takes a group of old fuddies, and, after a life time of abstinence, she fills them with booze. Frankly, she could have saved her money, and spent two hundred bucks on some potato chips and cheap Russian vodka and had the same results.
I was at least expecting something artistic out of this film, but it doesn’t live up to even the most modest expectations of European cinema. The fact that so many North Americans have bought into this load of trite and homely garbage says something very sad about us as a culture. It says that we not only have vulgar tastes, but that our tastes are so unrefined that we can’t even tell when we are being had by a fad. I am beginning to realize that years of Hollywood crud has made us so blind to artistic achievement that we just self-consciously applaud anything made in Europe. This is very sad, indeed.
In the end, a meager 3 scallions out of 10 for Babette’s very unappealing feast. Go see something by Bergman, instead. Sure his films are often dour, too, but at least the acting is good. I can assure you, there is nothing to see in Babette’s Feast.
No comments:
Post a Comment