Babette's Feast: A remarkable story about generosity

Babette's Feast

Amazon Price: $38.80 (as of 05/28/2012)

Exiled to Denmark after the Commune in a Protestant village of Jutland, Babette enters the service of two sisters, daughters of a Protestant minister. When she learns from a friend stayed in France that she won the lottery jackpot, she has only one desire: to bring joy to this community, the time for a fabulous meal...

A miracle. No other word to describe this "small" film from a story by Karen Blixen, author of Out of Africa. This astonishing story allows the Franco-Danish Gabriel Axel to take a tender look at this little world out of the world. But where the director proves stunning is through the infinite grace with which he films Stephane Audran in the title role: wonderful intelligence, humor, finesse, never the muse that she had been with Claude Chabrol -- The Unfaithful Wife, Le Boucher, Betty -- had been shown so radiant. In preparing her meal -- quail, turtle soup, divine Burgundy -- she gives life the moment of an evening to these little old men and women consumed by time and morality. Exquisite, divine and invigorating.

Just reward: this feast was awarded the Oscar for best foreign film in 1988.

A must for everyone interested in generosity.

Babette's Feast and Other Anecdotes of Destiny

by: Isak Dinesen

Amazon Price: $79.95 (as of 05/28/2012)

In the five stories of this book fantasy mingles with imaginative realism. In The Diver Karen Blixen (the real name of Isak Dinesen) demonstrates that where fish are the most accomplished beings most of creation. Babette's Feast is the story of a French fugitive woman who finds herself in a pious community in the depths of Denmark and manages to reconcile everyone through an exceptional meal while a snowstorm rages outside. In Tempests we follow a great actor who saves a ship and its passengers caught in a terrible storm. In The Immortal Story we are in Canton where a wandering wealthy old merchant, Paul (a sailor) and Virginia (the daughter of a victim of the merchant) form part of a story where reality takes over the story and in The Ring we discover deception in an idyllic marriage.

The central themes of the five stories artists of all kinds, the fear of nothing, which can reveal itself to be deadly, and Destiny.