Yes, you can look at Babette's Feast as some sort of slap at Puritanical Christianity, but it is much more than that. The surface story of how a gifted Parisian cook flees Paris after one of its revolutions by the middle classes and finds herself cast ashore in Jutland in the north of Denmark is simply the grease that allows the deeper tale to develop.<br /><br />Babette is an artist, one of the small army of people who are driven from pillar to post over the centuries by fatuous politicians, vane, greedy and arrogant, who kill beauty for profit, something that politics always does, pace National Endowment for the Arts, which simply institutionalizes creativity for propaganda purposes.<br /><br />Babette is on her last legs as she arrives in the tiny village where two virginal sisters reside seeing over their diminishing flock of devotees to their late pastor father. They live on salt cod and black bread gruel. <br /><br />Babette shows these simple pious people that God is in pleasure and sensuality as well as behavioral and mental purity. She also shows them how that mental purity can lead to control freakishness, something we all know about in these days of the neo-authoritarians in government who would limit our personal freedoms because they are somehow a crime against the state, or as they would tell us, humanity.<br /><br />Babette cooks up a bang-up French dinner to celebrate the 100th birthday of the late reverend. The daughters and their flock think it is the devil come amongst them and vow not to notice the food or drink. <br /><br />It is at this point, in the preparing of the meal, payed for by Babette's winnings in a French lottery, that I begin to tear-up. It is a poignance brought about in comparison to the daily vulgarity and mendacity that floods our consciousness from morning to night via the media and power-mongers manoeuvring to gain advantage over all of us out here in the dark.<br /><br />The simple sophistication of Babette's art spits in the face of all the pretentiousness on display in our modern society, and it hurts to watch it played out so exquisitely in this splendid film.<br /><br />It is, along with Fanny och Alexander (Bergman), my favorite film ever, yet I can only watch it once in awhile because, like a rare bottle of wine served with Blinis and fresh oysters, it is something that must not be over-done. <br /><br />A great, great film that should be in every movie-lover's library.