Babette’s Feast

I have to tell you about a great cinematic experience I’ve had. On Saturday, I saw the ever excellent, Babette’s Feast (Gabriel Axel, 1987), which was put on by the marvellous Rusthall Community Cinema, which is in a village abutting Tunbridge Wells. The Community Cinema was set up a couple of years ago and it has flourished under the stewardship of Eugene Gardner and the rest of its volunteers. The film is the story of Babette, who through some twists ends up being the housekeeper to two sisters living on the unforgiving Danish coast in the late nineteenth century.
Babette, we learn, is French and is recommended to the sisters by an erstwhile singing teacher and suitor to one of the sisters, a M. Papin. In fact Babette is actually more of a companion, who works for nothing, as the sisters cannot afford to pay her. A friend of Babette’s, in Paris continues to enter her into a local lottery and one day, after many years in Denmark her numbers come up and she wins 10,000 Francs.
To coincide with the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the sisters departed, Pastor father’s birth, Babette offers to cook a French feast for the sisters and the villagers, using the proceeds of her win to pay for this. There then follows the famous feast. In the depiction of the preparation we see languorous and lush sequences of the food in the kitchen, that bring to mind painted images of such by old masters.
The, film as well, treads that well-worn path in talking about redemption, forgiveness and eventual acceptance. What it does though is to show that with age, it’s often easier to forgive, especially when you’ve got a full stomach and you’ve had a few.
Now, in Rusthall on Saturday, the community cinema people and a local café, the Daily Bread, did their very best to recreate this meal before we saw the film. They did a stupendous job. We had a magnificent seven course meal which were reminded of throughout the film.
Rusthall Community Cinema certainly strives to earn its stripes as an event cinema destination. At previous films the volunteers have dressed for the occasion, especially for the Grand Budapest Hotel and Bridge of Spies. The Sunnyside Hall is normally adorned with appropriate ephemera. They really make an effort to make the films come alive. They organise discussion groups to chew over what we’ve just seen. This effort, though, was above and beyond the call of duty and made for an extra special evening.