Film Series: Life’s Banquet: Food in Films

At once a rousing paean to artistic creation, a delicate evocation of divine grace and the ultimate film about food, the Oscar-winning Babette’s Feast is a deeply beloved treasure of cinema. Directed by Gabriel Axel and adapted from a story by Isak Dinesen, it is the lovingly layered tale of a French housekeeper with a mysterious past who brings quiet revolution in the form of one exquisite meal served to a circle of starkly pious villagers in late 19th-century Denmark. Babette’s Feast combines earthiness and reverence in an indescribably moving depiction of sensual pleasure that goes to your head like fine champagne.

In Danish, French and Swedish with English subtitles.

One of the crowning achievements of the German Expressionist movement, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s The Last Laugh (Der letzte Mann) stars Emil Jannings as an aging doorman whose happiness crumbles when he is relieved of the duties and uniform that has for years been the foundation of his happiness and pride. Through Jannings’s colossal performance, The Last Laugh becomes more than the plight of a single doorman, but a mournful dramatization of the frustration and anguish of the working class.

Silent with English intertitles.

A tender and sweeping story about what roots us, Minari follows a Korean-American family that moves to an Arkansas farm in search of their own American Dream. The family home changes completely with the arrival of their sly, foul-mouthed, but incredibly loving grandmother. Amid the instability and challenges of this new life in the rugged Ozarks, Minari shows the undeniable resilience of family and what really makes a home.

Three grown sisters, Maribel, Leticia and Carmen, try to cope and live with the fact that their father Martin, a veteran chef, is slowly losing his sense of taste. Martin has one simple rule: be at home for Sunday dinner. Attendance is mandatory and non-negotiable. A rift in the family develops when the sisters develop relationships and an obnoxious woman sets her sights on Martin’s affections.

In this idiosyncratic, self-reflexive documentary, French cinema icon Agnès Varda explores the world of modern-day gleaners: those living on the margins who survive by foraging for what society throws away. By turns playful, philosophical and subtly political, The Gleaners and I is a warmly human reflection on the contradictions of our consumerist world from an artist who, like her subjects, finds unexpected richness where few think to look.

In French with English subtitles.