Chloe: Critic Girl/Renaissance Woman

Long had I held in my impressions that this movie was gastroporn, and that it was French! I suppose I had no real reason to believe these things other than the title and a recommendation from Entre Nous.

As I should have from my previous misconceptions, I believe I have now learned to keep an open mind and simply believe.

While the food that Babette creates is wondrous in itself, it is the power of touching people’s lives with what you do best that resonates throughout this film. Set in a small religious community in Denmark, Babette truly creates a life-changing, or at least enlightening, event with her culinary expertise. It took it’s time to get there, like any classic gastronomic phenomenon, and the creation was too much of a blur to be the miracle in itself. I was desperate to enjoy that meal and savor every taste with the unknowing recipients.

There also is a fair amount of religious symbolism that I am sure can be explored further and I would like to take the time to address after I’ve had the opportunity to watch this film several more times. The first that jumps out at me is the 12 diners at the table, breaking bread together. The diners themselves refer to the wedding at Cana, though the miracle here is not in riches made out of mere paucity. More significantly, the sisters - the right and left hand of their father, the prophet-priest - have arranged this dinner to celebrate their father, on the anniversary of his birth. Is he the Jesus figure to complete the Last Supper? Is the General, who guides the reluctant participants through the wonders, instead? Or is the sacrifice made by the woman in the kitchen, behind the scenes, who may have been able to be the twelfth at the table had not the General come to call?

The true miracle, though, is in the kinship and reconciliation that is brought out through good food, fantastic wine, and a well planned menu. May Babette forgive me for eating an improvised version of Don Henley’s chili over leftover grains when I could have been eating Caille en Sarcophage!

I do believe that my culinary adventure, though, in creating a warm late-winter stew on one of the last nights of the winter season might indeed be considered my art, as in Babette’s words, I simply strove to “do my best.”

see also: thoughts on the actual menu for Babette’s feast

I seem to have made myself the self-appointed evaluator of pseudo-Cinderella films in today’s media. I hope that some uninspired ingenue in film school will do the same.

A Cinderella Story - just typing out the name made me space out and think of much better versions (for the younger set - Ella Enchanted, for the “literary” film set - Ever After). But it does make me wonder why society has such a fascination with the tale of the little cinder girl. We have an easy answer - uninspired (the theme’s post, it would seem) writers take stories that worked and try to “update” them or re-tell them or make yet another buck on them. Every little girl grows up and wants to be in the Cinderella movie, so there is no shortage of starry eyed starlets to play the role.

There is also, of course, the stock re-telling of traditional fairy tales to empower girls and young women and eliminate the childhood myth that all a young girl needs is a prince on a white horse. And, in fairness, A Cinderella Story does attempt to do that. Young Sam’s father tells her that it’s not all about princes and there is more in that book that might help her than just being saved (how best to sweep floors in his diner?). We see Sam decide to stand up for herself (Warning: spoilers from here on in, disappointing, I know) and stand up to her evil stepmother (the ever-hysterical and usually under-used Jennifer Coolidge) and her wishy-washy text-message lover. So the requisite grrrl power elements are there.

The real change, though, happens in the wishy-washy text-message lover. When Sam stands up for herself, the underlying reason is that she thinks she got rejected from Princeton. She, herself, states earlier in the movie that she only follows orders because she needs tuition money from Fiona, the stepmother. So now that she’s not going to college (always apply to safeties, Sam!), she actually has nothing to lose and hasn’t taken any real chances. Her “family” at the diner has already let her know that they will support her so she has fallen into a safety net.

Austin, though, walks out of the homecoming game (oddly several days after the homecoming dance) during the final play of the game, handing off the glory to his lesser noticed sidekick to choose Sam, Princeton, and pissing off his dad. He chooses to be the “closet poet” writer inside instead of the hot jock full-riding to USC and Car Wash fame. Austin is the true cinderella coming out of the foofy-career-choice-closet (according to Big Andy, A’s pa) and wearing the glass slipper in full view.

But really, it looks like he just goes to kiss Sam in the rain.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind allows for some interesting questions. Are there really people out there that we can’t avoid regardless of the enormous lengths we would take to eliminate them from our lives? Will we ever be able to map to specific memories in such a way that we can delete them like so many files in a leftover laptop?

But most importantly, who would you erase? I suppose movies like this are meant to inspire existential questions and thoughts - even those “deep” thoughts that seem so cliche once they come out. Case in point: As I was falling asleep last night, I pondered this last question and I realized that there might not be any one relationship that I would actually want to erase - each has made me who I am today. So there, I said it.

And the movie makes a fairly good case against the very industry that it has created. Joel Barish can’t remember anything about the previous two years in his life since everything was colored by Clementine. Immediately after the procedure, he is despondent and depressed and believes that he has just done nothing but stand still for two years. (Not a spoiler, this is in the first ten minutes of the film) If we do indeed develop the ability to erase people we love so intensely as to wanting to erase them, then we will erase all emotions we feel during that time.

This procedure, though, may have some benefits - erasing so many drunken encounters, failed pick-up attempts, but more seriously - traumatic events. The first “who” I really thought of erasing was a terribly traumatic personal relationship that would only require erasing one day and some memories of the aftermath. I would be healed! But then, even the positive outpouring which came from that would be erased and so many good feelings that came from the bad would be lost forever.

In the end, erasing may not be such an exciting prospect after all….