Screen:

...her hand is expert even with a plain fish broth...

...Just guess what happens one night when he has to shield her in his apartment after hers is firebombed...

...In truth, the source is a tale by Isak Dinesen, whose severe understatement Director Gabriel Axel has retained, perhaps too successfully, for the movie...

...A similar problem is solved better in Babette's Feast, Danish Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Film...

...In Book 7, Chapter 7 of War and Peace, Tolstoy places the happiest event of the novel, the Rostovs' winter feast in the country: "herb wine, pickled mushrooms, rye cakes made with buttermilk, honey in the comb, still mead and sparkling mead, apples, nuts (both raw and roasted), and nut-and-honey-sweets...

...a fresh and roasted chicken, ham, preserves made with honey, and preserves made with sugar...

...Almost...

...Harrison Ford also manages some presence as a doctor whose wife (Betty Buckley) disappears while they visit Paris...

...When the kidnapper finally contacts Ford and arranges ransom, he warns, "Don't do anything stupid, doctor, or your beautiful wife goes bye-bye," an early candidate for the worst line in 1988...

...Heading the plot is Ray Salwen (Mandy Patink-in), McGillis's interrogator...

...Perhaps the highest praise for this film is that its suggestive power comes close to Tolstoy...

...Set on the rugged coast of Jutland, the film focuses on a small ascetic nineteenth-century Lutheran sect whose minister, when preaching, resembles a dour portrait of John Calvin...

...It's a tired thriller from Roman Polanski, who has actually made many fine films (Macbeth, Chinatown, Tess, Knife in the Water...

...Worse, what's left is unbalanced...

...O'Connor must be under the impression that he is onto new ground in exploring English repression, sexual anxiety, inability to speak, and the war's heritage of quiet on so many fronts...

...Worse, Polanski pror vides no tightening of suspense, no wit, nary a soupc,on of originality to redeem the banality...

...Early atmospherics that recall the sleaze of All the President's Men degenerate, especially when an FBI agent (Jeff Daniels) becomes McGillis's knight in shining armor...

...Kelly McGillis plays a Life assistant photography editor hounded from her job for belonging to a group called Liberty Watch...

...One (Colin Firth) comes to clean an interior church wall, behind which lies a medieval mosaic...

...It is that kind of English chapel Larkin described in Church Going, with "its tense, musty, unignorable silence brewed god knows how long...

...Almost...

...It takes little time for her (Stephane Audran) to impress the flock which the daughters still shepherd...

...The screenplay may be far-fetched, but at least it blends imaginatively two sets of headlines...

...Firth also gets to exchange plenty of sighs with Richardson, whose husband (de rigueur) is a cold puritanical oaf who ignores her...

...At times, the latter seems strained, as if Axel is trying to pull a rabbit out of, well, a roast quail...

...But Dinesen and Axel's core idea is the same...

...The second vet (Kenneth Branagh) digs outside the church grounds for some archeological oddities...

...The film, a political thriller about McCarthyism, has been cut down to ninety-five minutes, a quarter shorter than the standard feature...

...When old (played by Bodir Kjer and Birgitte Federspiel, a veteran of Carl Dreyer's 1955 masterpiece, Ordet), they hire as a cook Babette, who is fleeing France after the Commune's suppression...

...With her thick brows and husky physique (which, in interviews, she derides as "Junoesque"), McGillis is aptly cast as an American heroine before the Age of Aerobics...

...His labor is a noble effort, but a snooze...

...one wag at the preview carped that "somewhere in that, aching to come out, is a mighty small short story...

...They share a love of art, an unearthing of psychic war wounds, and at last a kind of healing...

...Later, at a new job, reading books to a rich old woman (Jessica Tandy), McGillis comes across evidence of a plot to smuggle ex-Nazis into the United States...

...At first Polanski tries to set a realistic tone-so steady and unmelodramatically monotonous is the early pace...

...Director Peter Yates is involved with sex and chases at the expense of background and character...

...Despite improbabilities, the film's premise is intriguing...

...TOM O'BRIEN...

...A face worth watching belongs to Natasha Richardson, the young daughter of Tony Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave...

...Surprise...

...Tolstoy creates such an intense physical sensation for the meal that he embodies in it the essence of any happy meal we could ever have-the idea of festive dining, or the holy communion which our daily bread only shadows...

...Despite her cliched role as a parson's wife, she makes one regret this waste of her powerful loveliness...

...Witch-hunting cold warriors used to ask, who lost China...

...Writer Walter Bernstein, who wrote the semi-comic The Front on the same themes, creates a Congressional committee HUAC-type inquisition of McGillis-the kind Bernstein knew too well from being blacklisted...

...I wish they had remained Junoesque...

...The casting lends credibility, especially when Patinkin (named to evoke Roy Conn and made up as Robert de Niro), casts greasily menacing glances at McGillis...

...Axel has filmed their world in such cool, blue tones (with light blue shawls, slate blue thatch) that it looks as if Vermeer had painted it...

...Predictably, all the usual suspects show up: drug dealers, Arab terrorists, CIA agents, and a very sexy, long-legged girl in punk regalia (Emmanuelle Seigner...

...Still, despite problems, Axel transubstantiates this Lenten fare into a mouthwatering film, perfectly acted, sumptuous to behold...

...But Frantic is just dead in the water...

...She also provides authenticity in her early fifties' clothing (the production design and costuming is superb...

...The plot of Babette's Feast is thin gruel...

...She waltzes through A Month in the Country with her mother's graceful mass, peach-blossom cheeks, and a nose beaked like a delicate bird's...

...TOM O'BRIEN Tolstoy...

...The fare in Babette's Feast (be warned, don't go hungry) is different, elegantly French, imported...

...In The House on Carroll Street, the question is who lost the screenplay...

...But Yates doesn't draw much out of her-no background regarding why she joined Liberty Watch, or why she pursues the Nazis after losing so much...

...Axel stages the dinner with a deft touch, allowing both for comedy (the sect tries desperately not to show pleasure) and philosophy by an outsider (one of the sisters' ex-beaux) who rhapsodizes not just about the food, but its spiritual meaning...

...When, after years in exile, she wins a lottery, she can't contain herself, and arranges an epicurean, haute Parisian feast that challenges their traditional austerity...

...None of it, not even an improbable happy ending (in 1951...

...From there on, it's cliche chasing cliche", all the way to the top of Grand Central Station...

...As with The Dead- another recent film featuring a sumptuous repast- Babette's Feast doesn' t always work in its new medium...

...His medieval look is matched by the thatched huts of the rural village where he and his two pre-Raphaelite-looking daughters lead their small band of followers in a life of hymns, prayer, plain living, high thinking, and spare diet...

...would be so bad, if more flesh were left on the characters...

...Polanski tracks him doggedly trying to make sense of the mystery...

...The film involves two time frames: the daughters' youth, when they are courted by handsome visitors (whom their father's influence quietly discourages) and their spinsterly age...

...A Month in the Country stretches understatement to its outer limits...

...Directed by Pat O'Connor (who made the fine Cal on the IRA), it concerns two Great War vets in Yorkshire during the twenties...