Consider, for example, the lengthy flashback in which the prospective suitors of two devout Lutheran sisters, Martina (Vibeke Hastrup) and Philippa (Hanne Stensgard), both depart. The decisions about what to illustrate and/or expand upon from the original (which was first published in Ladies Home Journal) are far from obvious or mechanical they frequently reflect the sort of unexpected slants and elaborations that one might expect to find in imaginative book illustrations. Its leading rival, moreover, was the more platitudinous Au revoir, les enfants – a star vehicle in its own right, but the star in this case was writer-director Louis Malle’s offscreen gilt-edged guilt.Īs story telling, Axel’s filmmaking is economical, fluid, and graceful. It won the recent Academy Award for best foreign-language film. Some of my misgivings are out-and-out biases, and in order to enable readers to make allowances for them accordingly, I’ve decided to place them in a section devoted to other gripes, which I’ll get to only after disposing of what I like about the film. But it’s still many rungs below Dinesen, despite several claims to the contrary. Admittedly, the two films don’t belong in the same class after Out of Africa, a star vehicle with pretty scenery (an even soggier reduction than the movie of Sophie’s Choice), Gabriel Axel’s film, Babette’s Feast, is a model of tact, intelligence, proportion, and scale. Yet the fact that two adaptations of her work have recently become box-office hits strikes me as something of a mixed blessing, if only because of certain essential elements of Dinesen that get shaved away in the process.

When Ernest Hemingway accepted his Nobel prize in 1954, he was gracious enough to acknowledge that it should have gone to Isak Dinesen instead.

Eudora Welty has defined it definitively in one short sentence of utter precision: “Of a story she made an essence of the essence she made an elixir and of the elixir she began once more to compound the story.” - Hannah Arendt on Isak Dinesen What she then did was unique in contemporary literature though it could be matched by certain nineteenth century writers - Heinrich Kleist’s anecdotes and short stories and some tales of Johann Peter Hebel, especially Unverhofftes Wiedersehen come to mind.

Only when she had lost what had constituted her life, her home in Africa and her lover, when she had returned home to Rungstedlund a complete “failure” with nothing in her hands except grief and sorrow and memories, did she be come the artist and the “success” she never would have become otherwise - “God loves a joke,” and divine jokes, as the Greeks knew so well, are often cruel ones. With Stephane Audran, Jean-Philippe Lafont, Gudmar Wivesson, Jarl Kulle, Hanne Stensgard, Bodil Kjer, Vibeke Hastrup, and Birgitte Federspiel.

Babette's feast short story