Babette’s Feast, by Isak Dinesen / Karen Blixen – DVD

January 5, 2010 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: DVD, Fiction, Karen Blixen 
  • Actors: Stéphane Audran, Bodil Kjer, Birgitte Federspiel, Babette's Feast, by Karen Blixen
    Jarl Kulle, Jean-Philippe Lafont
  • Director: Gabriel Axel
  • Writers: Gabriel Axel, Karen Blixen
  • Producers: Benni Korzen, Bo Christensen, Just Betzer, Pernille Siesbye
  • Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Letterboxed, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
  • Language: French (Dolby Digital 2.0), English (Dolby Digital 1.0), Spanish (Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround), Danish (Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround)
  • Subtitles: English, Spanish, French
  • Region: Region 1 U.S. and Canada only.
  • Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1
  • Number of discs: 1
  • Rating: G (General Audience)
  • DVD Release Date: January 23, 2001
  • Run Time: 102 minutes
  • 4.7 out of 5 stars at Amazon.com

Babette’s Feast – Description

Babette’s Feast is just a marvelous, fantastic and delicious story, based on the writings of Karen Blixen: Artistic, sensual and full of sacred passions. In Babette’s Feast, a woman flees the French civil war and lands in a small seacoast village in Denmark, where she comes to work for two spinsters, Martina and Philippa, devout daughters of a puritan minister. Both girls sacrifice youthful passion to faith and duty, and even many years after their father’s death; they keep his austere teachings alive among the townspeople.

After many years, Babette unexpectedly wins a lottery, and decides to create a real French dinner–which leads the sisters to fear for their souls. Joining them for the meal will be a Danish general who, as a young soldier, courted one of the sisters, but she turned him away because of her religion. The village elders all resolve not to enjoy the meal, but can their moral fiber resist the sensual pleasure of Babette’s cooking? A truly outrageous French gourmet meal?

Babette’s Feast deservedly won the 1987 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. This lovely movie is impeccably simple, yet its slender narrative contains a wealth of humor, melancholy, and hope.

The film is written and directed by Gabriel Axel, from a short story by Out of Africa’s Isak Dinesen. This Oscar-winning film offers “an irresistible mixture of dry wit and robust humanity” (Newsweek).

Links to Karen Blixen movies at Amazon US, Amazon UK, and Babette’s Feast (Amazon CAN)

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