The culture clash on set between the Danish crew (who enjoyed stopping at ten each morning for a schnapps break, according to Audran, and didn't comprehend the story of the film particularly well) and the 'foreign' star and director enhanced the tension that can be felt in the film. She didn't speak Danish, but fortunately director Gabriel Axel spoke fluent French.

The tale involves a pair of devout sisters living in a seaside village whose lives are changed by the arrival of a new housekeeper, Babette, a Parisian refugee whose winning lottery ticket prompts her to mount a lavish dinner for the sisters and the town's congregation, whose commitment to austerity is transformed in the process.īest known for her roles in films by her ex-husband, director Claude Chabrol, as well as Luis Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), Stéphane Audran was cast in the titular role of Babette on the strength of her performance in the dramatic thriller Violette (1978). The end result was actually rejected and instead found a home in Ladies' Home Journal in 1950. Backers were quickly found with funding secured from the Danish Film Institute, and Axel's film finally began production.ĭinesen had originally written the story on a bet from an American writer friend that she couldn't write a story for The Saturday Evening Post entirely about food. All of that changed in 1985 when the Sydney Pollack film Out of Africa became a box office hit and took home an armload of awards, with Meryl Streep playing the author herself in an adaptation of her autobiographical writings. Her work had inspired films in other countries, most notably Orson Welles' 1968 version of The Immortal Story, but Danish backers were unconvinced by the idea of mounting a production of the short story that inspired the film. However, Dinesen was a difficult selling point in her native country when Axel tried to get the project off the ground.

For fifteen years he intended this film to be a homecoming of sorts as well as a tribute to one of the country's greatest writers, Isak Dinesen, a pen name for Karen Blixen. Though now regarded as one of the most acclaimed and popular Danish films as well as a masterpiece of culinary cinema, Babette's Feast (1987) was a challenge to get off the ground for writer/director Gabriel Axel, who was born in Denmark in 1918 and made films there into the 1970s before shifting his attention to features and TV work in France.

Babette's feast by isak dinesen