From Word To Word

It was my wife who introduced me to the genre of the food movie.  We were still in highschool, and the film she showed me was Babette’s Feast by Gabriel Axel.  I have now seen this film seven or eight times, and I am always moved by the final scene where the people of the village begin to recognize each other again as they eat the food Babette is serving them.  Before I had even begun to articulate the philosophical and theological importance of the table to me, I intuitively recognized something significant in this scene, and I would recommend the film without reservation to anyone who loves food and to anyone who loves a good and simple story.

Last night, my wife and I discovered a similar film in Ali Raffi’s The Fish Fall in Love.  It is set in Iran, and it relates the story of a woman who runs a restaurant in the house of her former fiance, who had disappeared many years earlier but has now returned.  Frightened that he will evict her from the house and from her means of providing for herself, she and the other women who work with her decide to cook for him as a way of convincing him to allow them to stay.  The film is beautifully simple.  The story does not try to say too much.  The acting is understated and intimate.  The music does not overwhelm, as it too often does now in Hollywood films.   The film is content, and rightly so, to be what it is.

The scenes that take place in the kitchen and around the table are accomplished beautifully.  There is a real sense of the unique combination of labour and community that characterizes the kitchen, and an attention to the interactions that take place around the table.  There are also several places where food is offered from one person to another, and these scenes are marked with a similar degree of significance.  In every case, the food takes on a symbolic role, a ritual role, becomes a carrier of meaning and value.  Because of this role, the food itself is also the subject of the film’s gaze on many occasions, as the camera follows the food from the market and the garden, to the cutting board and the simmering pot, and finally to the plate.  These images produce an almost physical pleasure in me.  They are beautiful aesthetically, and even more so, because they are also beautiful symbolically.

I am not sure how readily available the film is wherever you might happen to be, but it is well worth the effort to go and find it.