I’ve always liked programming double features. It’s fun to juxtapose two movies against each other—a common game, especially in cinephile circles. Take Barbenheimer, which kicked off in 2023 partly because it’s amusing to think about Barbie dolls and the atom bomb at the same time, but also because the connection between Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie grows stronger the more you think about it: two mid-century American artifacts, emblematic of the anxieties of the atomic age, each dramatized in a genre that their respective writer/directors have mastered. Two meditations on the human death drive, one rendered in candy colors, the other in grimly deep jewel tones, each concerned with the question of self-destruction from different angles. This game can be played with any two movies: it’s a well-known Letterboxd joke to take two movies, find as many esoteric ideas that link them as possible, then add both to a list with an absurdly long title.
But the best double features are movies that speak to each other in interesting ways. This column is for doing just that.
***
Where there’s food, there’s fire, the possibility of community, the hope that a human being could have their needs met. Babette’s Feast (1987) and First Cow (2019) anchor themselves in locations dotted with small cooking fires, smoke rising in the cold. Both movies dream of human life as more than simple subsistence; both present simple stories in which the act of preparing a good meal threatens to tear a community apart. In one, food becomes a symbol of grace and generosity, a decadent gift that calls into question the villagers’ rejection of the good things in life. In the other, a good meal is a taste of home and also an opportunity to make money, which seeds the ability to make more money in turn—a catalyst for hoarding instead of generosity.
Both movies are stories about characters who dare to dream of food beyond the practical means of their current lives. Small dreams, but no less potent for their smallness; transformative dreams that bring about communal change.
*
Babette’s Feast (Babettes Gæstebud) is set in the late 1800s, in a remote fishing village on the Jutland coast of Denmark populated by Lutheran sectarians who value the simplicity of their lives as an expression of their piety toward God. It’s a cold, quiet village on a cold, quiet coast: a huddle of simple houses with thatched roofs around a well, flatfish smoking over an open fire nearby. The villagers are aging, and their little church is falling apart through slow, sad schisms after the death of their sect’s founder. His two daughters, Filippa (played by Bodil Kjer in old age and by Hanne Stensgaard as a young woman) and Martine (played by Birgitte Federspiel in old age and Vibeke Hastrup as a young woman), carry on the work of keeping the sect together, though they themselves are aging as well, nearly as gray as the elderly people whom they help to feed and keep warm.
The village plays host to a few strangers over the long years: a soldier named Lorens (played by Gudmar Wivesson as a young man and Jarl Kulle in old age) and a famous French opera singer named Achille Papin (Jean-Philippe Lafont). Both men court Martine and Filippa and both are turned away by the sisters, who prefer their ascetic, pious lives over the myriad distractions of the outside world. The sisters grow old as they strive to keep the village alive and together, while the men move on: Lorens, once an inveterate gambler and scoundrel, goes on to become a general, while Papin loses his fame with his youth, turning gray as he’s forgotten by the rest of the world.
Life goes on in the village, unconscious of distant troubles, until the fall of the French Commune leads a woman from Paris to flee France for the safety of the distant Jutland coast. Babette (Stéphane Audran) arrives in Jutland on a stormy night, her rich dress and cloak billowing around her like the sails of a ship run aground. She’s lost her home, her husband, and her son, escaping with only her life and a letter of introduction from Achille Papin, who’d been a friend of hers. Martine and Filippa agree to take Babette in, though they cannot pay her for her work. She lives with them for 14 long years of exile, keeping their house and helping feed the poor and the elderly, until one day, quite unexpectedly, she wins the Parisian lottery—the only remaining tie between herself and her home country. Ten thousand francs: wild riches, especially after so many years of poverty. After winning the lottery, she asks for her first favor from Filippa and Martine: the opportunity to cook them a single meal, on the occasion of the celebration of what would have been their father’s hundredth birthday.
*
First Cow’s plot relies on cooking, communal ties, and a few lucky turns as well. Its central characters, Cookie (John Magaro) and King-Lu (Orion Lee), have found themselves in the woods of Oregon amongst other men who have abandoned their own hometowns to seek their fortunes. Kelly Reichardt’s film takes place in 1820, long before Oregon became a state, but well after American, French, and British trappers have established a foothold in the woods. There are rumors of gold in the hills, and beavers are becoming ever so slightly more scarce in the thick trees. The trappers are rough, and their settlements rougher: a cluster of huts, a trading post, a nice house for the settlement’s leader Chief Factor (Toby Jones), and a few scattered tents. The fort is more outdoors than in, a village with boundaries so porous that the only way to really tell if a scene takes place in town is by how much mud has been kicked up by foot traffic. The other reliable signs of human life are small cooking fires, smoking in the rain of the Pacific Northwest.
“Cookie” is a nickname, a diminutive that reduces the character to his role as cook in trapping crews. The name conjures images of sweets, a rarity in First Cow’s setting. Cookie lives up to his nickname: Magaro plays the character with a soft tenderness. Unlike the trappers he’s taken up with, his character is gentle. Other characters sense this: while drinking at the fort’s lone bar, Cookie finds himself tasked with watching a baby while the child’s father joins a brawl. There’s no question about Cookie joining the fight; it’s simply not in his nature. This makes him appealing to King-Lu, whom we—and Cookie—first meet as he’s on the run from men who want to kill him. Cookie feeds, clothes, and shelters King-Lu, and the two men take a swift liking to each other: strangers in a strange land, trying to survive, looking for ways to make it without needing to resort to violence.
Unlike Cookie, who quietly follows fortune when it beckons, King-Lu is an opportunist who makes his own luck. Cookie goes foraging for mushrooms in the woods; King-Lu questions whether they should have to spend long hours gathering at all. Cookie wants to open a hotel, or perhaps a bakery, two dreams in tune with his gift for giving food and shelter to those who need it. King-Lu has ideas about how to make the desire come true. Both men slip into an easy friendship, the pair plotting together without the means—the “capital,” according to King-Lu—to make their dreams a reality. It’s hard to bake anything sweet, or even substantial, without sugar or milk. Then King-Lu hits on an idea: Chief Factor has a cow, the first in the Oregon territory. They could milk the cow in secret at night. A sudden windfall, a secret ingredient: the ability to make food that no one else in the territory can make. The two devise a plan to make oily cakes to sell at the fort.
*
The respective protagonists of Babette’s Feast and First Cow are both valued and taken for granted for their ability to cook. Both are strangers in the remote lands where they find themselves, and take their craft seriously, even as the people around them relegate the art of cooking to the literal back burner. The Oregon fort and the Jutland coast are cold, rainy, remote places; their characters must gather and catch their own food, or else trade directly with whoever did the catching. The food that’s easiest to access is practical, simple, something that can be cooked over a fire and last the winter. Jerky, squirrel, and berries in Oregon; smoked cod and bread-and-ale soup in Jutland. Food keeps the body together; it’s not a luxury, but it is precious.
Yet Babette and Cookie are generous, even with what they don’t have. Cookie gives a desperately hungry King-Lu what little food his trapping party has left, while Babette finds ways to stretch a simple diet into something delicious by foraging herbs and cleverly bargaining with the village grocer. The two excel beyond the simple demands of their jobs. To Cookie and Babette, food is something to be savored, not just subsisted on.
Most people in their respective communities seem to have forgotten that fact, though they’re dependent on it. Food is the glue that holds a community together: The grocer in Babette’s Feast is also the mailman for the town, and his store serves as a community hub of sorts. The fort in First Cow, too, is a community hub little more than a crossroads surrounded by cooking fires where people come to buy or trade for food and supplies. There are nuts, berries, squirrels, and even extraordinarily expensive whiskey and pickles. Life is possible, and can even be enjoyable; in each movie, the land has sustained life for generations—the Danes who’d lived ascetic lives on the coast of Jutland, and the Tlingit people who’d inhabited Oregon long before white men came to trap beaver.
The villagers of Babette’s Feast and the trappers of First Cow have reduced food to its utility, a situation that Babette and Cookie must navigate, even though it isn’t to their liking. Babette learns how to cook cod and ale-and-bread soup, a process that involves taking hard bread crusts and soaking them in water (a cooking method that Babette does not remark upon, though her distaste is plain on her face as the sisters demonstrate their methods). By the time we meet him, Cookie has learned how to stretch a meal as far as it can go. And though the ingredients they work with are plain, they’ve learned how to make their meals delicious: the first line we hear in First Cow is a trapper asking Cookie about a meal he’d cooked weeks before. Babette’s ale-and-bread soup is better than anything the villagers can make, even though they were the ones to teach her how it’s done.
Utilitarian food still comes at a cost. Babette knows how to bargain down the price of ingredients, while King-Lu talks up the price of the oily cakes he and Cookie sell at the fort. The cakes in particular are new, a delicacy, and King-Lu reasons that they should be sold like the fort’s precious pickles and whiskey: high prices for rare treats. King-Lu does the math in his head, constantly; he could be making more if he could somehow buy beaver glands off the trappers who only hunt the animals for their pelts. It’s wasteful; the oils in beaver glands would make a man’s fortune in China. The trappers spend exorbitant amounts of money on delicacies like liquor from back home, but they don’t understand the riches they’re throwing away here in Oregon. Chief Factor’s wife (Lily Gladstone), a Tlingit woman, notes the wastefulness of the trappers with amusement. The men trap beaver for their pelts, but they throw away the best part of the animal. “The tails are delicious,” she says with a smile. Trappers come home to the fort hungry, willing to spend beyond their means for a taste of home, ignorant of the good food they’ve left to rot in the woods.
Nor do the Danish villagers understand the riches spread before them, at least not at first. When rumor spreads through the village that Babette is going to cook a feast for their founder’s birthday, the sectarians get nervous. When they see the ingredients arrive by boat, they’re frightened by the decadence: bottles and bottles of wine, live quail in a cage, a block of ice, the green curve of a sea turtle’s shell. The villagers worry that Babette’s feast will lead them to drunkenness and sin; one experiences bad dreams in which Babette offers a tankard of wine that seems to open the pit of hell, orange flames rising above her welcoming smile. They’ve never seen such abundance and variety of food before. They make a pact amongst themselves not to speak of the food Babette puts before them.
*
Both First Cow and Babette’s Feast revolve around food so delicious, it splits apart the fabric of the community.
In Jutland, Babette prepares her feast with the help of one of the village boys, having him pour drinks and carry platters of food out to the table of elderly sectarians. The drama of the film revolves around whether the villagers can come to understand the fine food Babette is about to spread before them; for Babette’s part, she sets the table, giving instructions to her young assistant with the calm assuredness that comes with practice. She’s made meals like this before, though it’s unclear precisely how this one will turn out; the kitchen is small and she’s the lone chef for a seven-course meal. Axel frames the scene almost like a heist, refusing to give the details of what’s to come. In a heist, the joy is in watching a plan be pulled off, even when unexpected circumstances arise; in Babette’s case, a dinner originally planned for eleven must become a dinner for twelve. After long years away fighting, General Lorens has returned to Jutland, another guest who’s gathered to honor the founder’s memory. When asked if there will be enough food with another seat at the table, Babette only nods and smiles and says, “Yes. There will be enough.” The heist must go on, despite unexpected details and unlooked-for guests.
And the food is incredible: turtle soup, quail cooked into nests of puff pastry, thin pancakes stacked high and smothered in cream and caviar, platters of fruit piled with figs and grapes and even a papaya. When each course emerges from the kitchen, it’s as though time has stopped. The villagers taste the food, suspicious at first, then full of wonder, returning for second sips of the fine Madeira Babette has paired with her dishes. One bites deep into a fig that bursts across his chin; others hook stealthy tastes of their soup before realizing just how good the food is. They grow bolder as they come to understand what they’re eating. They have a communal experience, though they have no words to express what the food is doing to them. And the food is working on both a physical and spiritual level. Tongues are loosed; villagers who have been fighting with each other for years are suddenly willing to talk, politely and even playfully, about their grievances with each other.
Cookie and King-Lu’s oily cakes are a simpler thing than Babette’s feast, though in a settlement with no sweets, they’re immediately treated as precious, a revelation that creates expressions of wonder that rhyme with the looks on the faces of the Jutland villagers. Men line up hoping to get a cake before they sell out. “I taste London in this cake,” says Chief Factor with amazement when he finally gets a bite. What he tastes—but doesn’t recognize—is the milk from his own cow. Riches he keeps but has no idea how to use. Cookie and King-Lu had taken it just the night before. Oily cakes are enough to bring a smile to the faces of the trappers who are lucky enough to get to buy one, though the supply is lower than demand, and King-Lu charges a high price. They’re delicious, but they threaten to drive a wedge into the little community. One boy, perpetually too slow to the line to buy oily cakes, keeps getting turned away empty-handed; he doesn’t have enough money anyway.
Reichardt treats the night sequences of First Cow like slow-paced robberies: first Cookie foraging for mushrooms in the dark until he finds King-Lu, hungry and desperate, then a quiet return to the trapper camp to find food and clothing. The midnight visits to the cow become a routine heist, an almost laughable situation in a world where there are no real walls or locks to speak of. King-Lu serves as lookout, perched up in a tree; Cookie brings a stool and a pail and his own gentle demeanor. He’s most willing to talk when he’s milking the cow; nerves on his part, maybe, but also reassurances for the animal in order to keep her calm. The milk’s worth more than its weight, and when Cookie carries it away, he does so as tenderly as he speaks to the cow.
The trouble with pulling off a heist is that you should never do it twice; to walk in and take something repeatedly is to risk getting caught. Cookie and King-Lu are found out when the cow nuzzles up to Cookie during the day in Factor’s presence; the man finally begins to put the pieces together, to understand that Cookie’s cakes taste heavenly because he’s been pilfering ingredients. Cookie and King-Lu are forced to flee into the woods, pursued by angry men with guns working for Factor. The next time we see the cow, she’s grazing in her usual meadow, but this time she’s been surrounded by a makeshift fence of wood stakes, trapped in a space too small for her, like the famed medieval tapestry of a captive unicorn. The cow, like a unicorn, is the only one of her kind, a source of wonder kept by men who don’t understand that hoarding something precious doesn’t make it more so.
Unlike Factor, Babette is generous with her riches, and she refuses to hide them away. She has a spectator in the kitchen as she prepares the meal: Lorens’s carriage driver, a man with massive eyes and smile who can’t stop gaping at the dishes as they come out of the oven. Babette treats him to the same food as the sectarians at dinner. “This is good!” he exclaims as he tries a glass of wine, and Babette only smiles and hands him a plate of pancakes piled high with cream and caviar, telling him, “This is good,” a yes-and that promises more rich food to come. The village boy and the carriage driver have smiles on their faces as they help her prepare the feast, as though they’re getting away with something. They’ve managed to pull one over on the aging sectarians around the dinner table, and everyone comes away richer for it.
*
Babette’s feast concludes with General Lorens rising to give a speech. Out of everyone around the table, he was the only one who didn’t refrain from discussing the meal. He demonstrates how each course is to be eaten, and he alone is willing to speak about how good the food is, and how exquisite each dish. Like Chief Factor remarking that he tastes London in an oily cake, General Lorens points out to his dinner companions that one of the dishes at the table—the quail cooked in nests of flaky puff pastry—is a signature invention of the head chef at the famed Cafe Anglais in Paris. The chef had been a woman—had been Babette. Lorens, who had been allied with the general who had Babette’s family killed, comes to understand at Babette’s table that everything he’s fought for, fame, title, military victory, good standing at the Swedish Court, is all for nothing compared to Babette’s food. “Grace is infinite,” Lorens says, and he means it. He’s been shown a form of grace throughout the dinner, the kind of life-changing epiphany that’s enough to make a man give up calling and career.
The point of a community is togetherness, to make sure everyone’s sheltered and cared for and fed. The Jutland sectarians give up worldliness with the intent of cultivating a little community with their eyes pointed heavenward, but in rejecting the pleasures of good food, they’ve lost a vision of grace on earth. The grace they believe in is an abstract idea—not nourishing, not full. Babette’s everyday cooking is grace, a willingness to acquiesce to the villagers’ wishes for plain things out of respect for their faith. Her feast is grace piled on grace, a gift given to people whom she knows will not fully understand the enormity of what they’ve been given. Her dinner is a catalyst, a force strong enough to make friends out of old enemies and patch up schisms.
In the Oregon wilderness, friendship becomes a shelter, something that sustains and grants the creativity to think outside the hierarchy the settlers want to impose upon the land. The film begins with an epigraph quoting William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell: “The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.” Cookie and King-Lu seek to build something beyond their means; because they need the capital to do so, they get creative in sourcing their materials. Chief Factor has no idea what to do with the riches at his fingertips, so they’ll sell them back to him, transformed into something delicious and nourishing, the means they need to get ahead. They look for a way out of their poverty by cheating capitalism, but because they must build capital by taking someone else’s capital, the entire endeavor is warped from the start.
Both films close with the choice to remain in community. Babette spends the entirety of her lottery winnings on the ingredients for her feast; she has no remaining ties to France, and no desire to leave Jutland. Martine and Filippa are horrified when they find that Babette is penniless once more, but she reassures them that she doesn’t need it, saying, “An artist is never poor.” She’s found a home and a community in the cold coastland, and she’s made it beautiful. As for Cookie and King-Lu, the two find themselves on the run in the woods from Chief Factor’s men. Cookie sustains a head injury, but King-Lu won’t leave him behind. The two stop to rest, King-Lu offering to take the first watch as Cookie succumbs to his need to sleep. “We’ll go soon,” King-Lu tells him. “I’ve got you.” The two find their end there in the woods, side-by-side and peaceful in a small togetherness, rich beyond the reckoning of anyone back at the fort.
