Wednesday, September 6
Movie Luther on Chocolat and Babette's Feast
Herr Doktor takes on Chocolat and Babette's Feast in his search for Lutheranism in the cinema. I'm wholly in agreement with his taking down the insufferably smug Chocolat down several pegs. Not only was its philosophy flawed, but it was also ludicrously unbelievable: since the death of Jansenism, have Frenchmen and French Catholics ever been so stereotypically dour? (The title is equally pretentious--Shok-o-laaaut, like the hilariously flakey neo-Pre-Raphaelite teenybopper in those old PBS commercials rabbiting on about how "I'm going to marry a gentleman and go to Paris..." Those who know what I mean, know what I mean.)
I agree with his general assessment of Babette's Feast, though I'd say that his logic behind casting the movie as Lutheran really marks it more as a Catholic film; at the very least, if it is Lutheran, it is of a high-church and distinctly sacramental Lutheranism (which is not unknown, of course) dominated by a viewpoint historically more associated with Catholicism rather than the American varieties of Protestantism. But then, I would say that.
I agree with his general assessment of Babette's Feast, though I'd say that his logic behind casting the movie as Lutheran really marks it more as a Catholic film; at the very least, if it is Lutheran, it is of a high-church and distinctly sacramental Lutheranism (which is not unknown, of course) dominated by a viewpoint historically more associated with Catholicism rather than the American varieties of Protestantism. But then, I would say that.
![[SMMMHDH]](http://www.mgilleland.com/music/smmmhdh.png){kind=small}
