Gabriel Axel's film, from a story by Isak Dinesen, treats of two spinsterly sisters devoted to Good Works on the Jutland Coast near the end of the last century, of how they came to have a French maid, and of how the maid, after fourteen years of gratuitous service, came to cook them un vrai dîner français to commemorate their father's hundredth birthday and her own personal windfall of fortune. The storytelling during the "how" parts gets mired in prolonged flashbacks, and turns for help to an intrusive and overly necessary narrator. It affords you, through all of that, plenty of time to wish anew that there were an accepted format for cinematic works shorter than feature-length. But the feast itself and the buildup to it are ample rewards for toughing it out. There is, for one thing, a steadily rising parabola of humor, as the two old Puritans give their blessing to the maid's project in a burst of Christian charity and then repent their action in an afterglow of Christian guilt: they have no idea, once they come to think of it, what goes into un vrai dîner français and the nearest thing they can imagine to it in their own experience is a witches' sabbath. And the expansive and expanding emotional scope of the dinner, effecting a true communion and conciliation, as well as a neat tying-up of earlier plot threads, cancels out the difficult path the movie took to get there: the spirit of forgiving, if not forgetting, is precisely the order of the evening, and a viewer can easily be caught up in it too. Lastly (and probably leastly) the actual presentation and consumption of the various drinks and dishes may even have some socially redeeming value -- for viewers on diets, say, or on Burger King dining budgets -- in much the way that pornography is contended to have for certain other kinds of people. As our data on that sort of issue is imprecise, the point must remain moot. Stephane Audran, Jarl Kulle. (1987) — Duncan Shepherd
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