Babette's Feast (U) - Reviews - Films - The Independent Twenty-five years since it won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language film, Gabriel Axel's gentle drama of grace and flavour still works a spell. Stéphane Audran plays the titular chef who has fled Paris in 1871 and fetched up on the wind-whipped Jutland coast to work as maid for two elderly, God-fearing Danish sisters. When Babette wins the lottery she decides to spend the money on a gastronomic feast the likes of which the sisters and their puritanical neighbours have never before experienced. I liked the look of the caviar and blinis with the 1860 Veuve Clicquot. While it's a great film about food, it's an even better one about exile, self-sacrifice and thwarted love.