Word: isak
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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BABETTE'S FEAST Cooking is a metaphor for art in Gabriel Axel's wise, deeply ironic and richly realized adaptation of Isak Dinesen's story...
BABETTE'S FEAST From Isak Dinesen's tale of two spinsters and their mysterious French cook, Gabriel Axel has brewed a quietly delectable comedy...
Despite her name's presence in the title of this adaptation of an Isak Dinesen story, Babette Hersant (Stephane Audran) does not appear in the film until it is almost half over. Even then she is, as it were, in disguise. She is presented merely as a Frenchwoman rendered homeless and penniless by the Communard uprising of 1871 in Paris, seeking refuge in a remote village in Jutland on Denmark's northern coast. If there is something unusual in her bearing, its source -- an extraordinary talent -- is not hinted at. For 14 years she toils unpaid, uncomplaining, almost unspeaking...
...workers as she lurches from tantrum to euphoria and back again, but he praises her meticulous observations of animal life and her unceasing struggles with poachers and politics as she fights to save the mountain gorillas from extinction. Her Africa is not the ordered master-and-servant backdrop of Isak Dinesen's tales. Three French visitors make a wrong turn on a back road and get fatally detained by Congolese troops. Fossey angrily tells her family, "They were reportedly tortured . . . hung on racks, finally eaten. The Congo can't be covered by the press, like Vietnam, thus no one knows...
Beryl, as everyone called her, spent money when she had it and ran up bills when she did not. In important matters, which meant clothes and horses, she went first-class. She had women friends -- Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) was an early protector -- but she liked men better. Her maternal instinct was fitful at best, and her appetite for casual sex made uproarious disarray of her marriages. Blixen once wrote of her own husband Bror (who became Beryl's occasional bedmate) that "he looked down benevolently and lasciviously upon womankind and had been raised to believe that the entire world...