Hi, Fair Food Fighters! I’m a film nerd who’s been invited to talk about movies: movies about food, movies featuring food, and movies featuring people as food (what? We taste like chicken!).
Despite the sensory loss, movies are still suited to gastronomy; food’s so symbolic it’s easy to plot around it. Some food movies manage more plot than others, and some do food more justice than others, but even in movies where food isn’t crucial, there’s meaning behind the meal.
Take the mother of all food films: Babette’s Feast.
Babette’s Feast is the quintessential food movie, a precursor to a dozen other dinner-centric films that followed it, a celebration of the power of a single supper, fed to the right people. It’s also a rare food movie in that it’s almost entirely about the meal it chronicles, which puts a lot of pressure on that meal to be extraordinary enough to justify ninety minutes of wind-up.
Does it?
It’s a tough call; this celluloid supper is up against an awful lot, especially since the film is a fairy story told in archetypes, and the meal is so specific that it has the potential to throw the move off its axis.
Babette’s Feast is a slightly acidic folk tale about two elderly sisters who turned aside from their young loves and are now presiding over their tiny, ascetic community. For the last fifteen years, their mysterious maid Babette has been keeping house for them. One day, she wins the 10,000-franc French Lottery and decides to spend it on one grand meal for her emotionally withholding employers and the needy inhabitants of the town.
The hilariously ungrateful townsfolk see the ingredients coming off the boat from France and worry that the nice meal will be sinful, so they all agree not to enjoy the meal or mention anything nice about it. (Babette really invested that 10k wisely.)
Because this is the movies, sister Martine’s old lover breezes in just in time to sit for dinner. He’s unaware that everyone around him is determined to act like a jerk, and as the meal progresses, he praises the food to the skies, and mentions that the meal reminds him of a fantastic meal he had at Café Anglais in Paris. He then declares his eternal love for Martine, and goes home to his wife. We can only assume a Jackie Collins novel breaks out when he gets back.
Of course, the chef at Café Anglais was Babette, and when, at movie’s end, the sisters express shock that Babette spent all ten grand on a group of ingrates instead of living up her retirement in France like a normal person, Babette’s only response is a beatific, “An artist is never poor.” (I disagree! Many artists are poor! The Glutted Artist is not an archetype!) As for the meal of a lifetime? It goes like this:
Turtle Soup
Buckwheat Blinis with Caviar and Sour Cream
Quail in Puff Pastry
Salad (not pictured, because lettuce is lettuce)
Cheese and Fruit Plate including papaya and pineapple (not pictured)
Cake with Syrup and Fruit
Not bad, considering she hauled it all by boat from France to serve it up to a bunch of people who refuse to acknowledge that it’s tasty, and then leave her in the kitchen while they have a bunch of revelations and dance blithely in the frigid town square.
But the full-on happy ending of Babette’s Feast may not be the point. (I really hope it’s not the point.) This is a movie about food disguised as a movie about a village, and the village’s reluctance to admire her work means that Babette is working hard at something inherently transient – this meal, by nature, can never be made again – and not receiving any of the accolades that are her due.
Food as a metaphor for art is possibly the best use of food on film (second only to food as a MacGuffin); we’ll see food-as-art again in Big Night and a handful of other movies, all of whom use the fleeting nature of the art as a backdrop to explore the life and times of the artist who can’t help but create, even knowing that success is impossible.
In Babette’s Feast, this Sisyphean art is presented in stark contrast to the children’s-book silhouettes of the villagers under the night sky; while they gather and smile, Babette sits alone in the ruined kitchen, surrounded by remnants and rinds, and downs a cup of something we can only hope is 80 proof. It’s a familiar sight for anyone who’s offered to host a dinner party; the portrait of the artist at rest.
I hear you, Babette.
