Gabriel Axel    The Danish Director Spices 'Babette's Feast' By PAUL CHUTKOW PARIS The Danish film direc-tor Gabriel Axel is a man inhabited by two sharply conflicting spirits. Meet Mr. Axel in his modern, functional apartment in Paris and he looks a tall, reedy, austere Scandinavian, a director who values Craft over Passion, Technique over Inspiration. He wears relaxed corduroy slacks but keeps his sweater primly buttoned up tight under his gray spade of a beard. Expressive theater masks peer down from his wall, but masks mounted in a tight, methodical row. A craftsman bent on perfection, he keeps on his shelves volumes of workbooks filled with period pictures and news articles, a life's collection of detail, fashion and atmosphere from which he may one day re-create starkly realistic scenes. Ah, but now plant this dry stalk of a Scandinavian spirit into the artistic richness of the Relais d'Auteuil, a fresh young French restaurant on the edge of Paris, and just watch Gabriel Axel bloom. The warm red of the awning outside, the exuberant sprays of fresh flowers inside, the luxurious look of the silver warming cart, all these inspire him, fire his imagination, start him singing the praises of his years bathed in French culture. This is Gabriel Axel the fervent gourmet, the impassioned artist, the enchanted director of the new film "Babette's Feast." "Babette's Feast" has been nominated for an Academy Award for the best foreign film of 1987, and it opens in New York at the Cinema Studio on Friday. The film, already warmly received by critics at the New York Film Festival and various festivals in Europe, is centered around a sumptuous French feast that stuns a tiny, seaside Danish village at the end of the 19th century. It is a film of layers and contrasts, setting earthly sensual pleasures against Lutheran ideas of spiritual purity, French joie de vivre against Danish austerity, the solitary artist against an unapppreciative, often uncomprehending world. Mr. Axel the man unfolds as slowly and carefully as his film, and he reveals as many complexities. But uncork a young, fruity red Saumur from the Loire, begin anticipating the elegant 10-course gastronomic feast being prepared by the chef Patrick Pignol, and in a few minutes Gabriel Axel is explaining how his 40 years in acting, directing, theater, television and film finally came down to a tormented love affair. A love affair with the story of Babette, written by his fellow Dane Karen Blixen, who, under the pen name Isak Dinesen, became the celebrated author of "Out Of Africa." "For 14 years this story haunted me," Mr. Axel said. It was a story that cut to the heart of the Scandinavian character and the nature of the artist, and on both points Mr. Axel said he felt a strong affinity with the Baroness Von Blixen and what she was able to express through the character of Babette, the chef who prepares the feast. "All the arts are intimately joined," Mr. Axel said. "And all the arts are a marriage of craft and passion, detail and atmosphere, color and texture. Getting all the elements right in a restaurant is just as difficult as getting them all right in a story or in a film. All that is brought out in the story of Babette." But more than their feelings about art bind Mr. Axel and Karen Blixen. Both had to leave Denmark, a provincial little country of only 5 million people, to seek their artistic identity and recognition. Both refused to cultivate the local literary and artistic circles, and both paid dearly for their refusal. Karen Blixen felt an exile when she returned to Denmark, and only now, after her death, has she received at home the glowing recognition she had earlier received abroad. "You're never a prophet in your own country," Mr. Axel said, and he feels that lesson profoundly. "Babette" was recently passed over in Danish film awards, and for years Mr. Axel failed to raise local funding for the production. He finally made the film with Britain's Panorama Film International, with American distribution assured by Orion Classics. He has had similar problems trying to produce a film based on the original legend of Hamlet, the prince at the very heart of Danish legend. The common bonds of all the arts, the plight of the artist in an uncaring society - these are truths Mr. Axel had to learn the hard way. The son of an engineer, he spent most of his school days in France, and then went home to study acting at the Danish National Conservatory. But his real education came when he came back to France to start as a stagehand with the Paris theater company of Louis Jouvet, one of this century's greatest French actors and directors. "I learned more in eight days with Jouvet than I did in two years at the conservatory," Mr. Axel said. One of the most important lessons he learned was that the story was supreme, and that the director's hand should be so invisible as never to distract from the story line. And he also learned that in working with actors great patience was essential, as was respect for the original author's work. "One time I saw Jouvet do 400 rehearsals of Moliere's 'Don Juan,' " Mr. Axel recalled. "He just couldn't get one part right. So during a whole week he did nothing but that. It finally worked when they went carefully back to the original text. As the actor Pierre Renoir explained it, Moliere was simply the strongest of them all." Mr. Axel's first plan was to become an actor, and he did one 50-day stint at the start. But soon he found himself waking up at 8 A.M. and spending his day worrying if he'd be late for the opening evening curtain. "Since then, I've always had a deep respect for actors," he said. "I understand their suffering. I have never found the the limits of my patience. People say that actors are like children, but it's not exactly that. You have to help them have the confidence of children." Mr. Axel's directing career began totally by chance. He was working in a Copenhagen boulevard theater that was about to go bust. He came up with a frothy scenario called "Florence and the Dentist." But there was no one to direct, until the desperate owner drafted Gabriel Axel. From there he went to Danish television, most often putting on French classical plays. In 1967 he made a film called "The Red Mantle," which was well received at the Cannes Film Festival and later in America. Then he did a series of interviews on the subject of pornography, enlivened it with a series of funny sketches, and the result was a $50,000 film called "Danish Blue," a financial success that bought him a summer house in Spain and helped demystify the issue of pornography. "Why was there pornography at that time?" he said. " The answer we found was stunningly simple: loneliness. And when the fruit was no longer forbidden, interest in pornography plummeted." In 1977, frustrated by what he felt was a limited working environment in Denmark, Mr. Axel came back to France, and this has been his second home ever since. He divides his time between Paris and Copenhagen, but his culture - and his cuisine - is almost always French, thanks to his French-born wife of 33 years, Lucie. Although nearing 70, Mr. Axel looks no more than a vigorous 55. He has four children, five grandchildren, and he says he has a secret: "What keeps me young? Love. Lucie is both my wife and my mistress. And she is a great French cook, learned the old-fashioned way, from her mother, who learned the real specialties from her mother. Lucie can do the menu from 'Babette's Feast.' " With his experience, his bicultural background and this long immersion in the glories of French cuisine, Mr. Axel's talents and feelings about Art found the perfect medium in Karen Blixen's story of Babette. First sold to the Ladies Home Journal in 1950, the story was later published in her collection of short stories, "Anecdotes of Destiny." The story recounts how Babette flees Paris in 1871, after her husband and son are shot dead in the uprising of the Paris Commune. Babette takes refuge in Norway, although the film makes this Denmark's Jutland Peninsula, and finds shelter as the housekeeper for two elderly daughters of the late Lutheran minister of the village. As the story and the film unfold, so do potential love affairs that the sisters resisted, lest the passionate pleasures of love spoil the purity of their spiritual commitment. For 14 years, Babette lives in anonymity with the elderly sisters, until comes the time when the sisters want to celebrate what would have been the 100th birthday of their father the minister. About this time, Babette wins the French lottery, with a prize of 10,000 francs, and she asks the sisters to allow her to honor their father and their hospitality toward her with a real French meal. The story loses its beauty in a brief retelling, but the meal Babette puts together, from provisions specially boated in from France, is fit for European royalty: turtle soup, blinis Demidoff with caviar, and quail stuffed with truffle and served in pastry shells. The wines are enough to make any connoisseur drool with delight: an Amontillado sherry to go with the turtle soup, Veuve Clicquot champagne 1860, a Clos Vougeot Burgundy from 1845. And in the course of the meal, Babette is revealed to have been the toast of le tout Paris, the brilliant chef of a legendary restaurant that Karen Blixen called Cafe des Anglais. It is what the French call a "role in gold" for the French actress Stephane Audran, who is known to American film buffs for often playing the uptight French bourgeoise in the films of Claude Chabrol, her former husband. Her Babette is a portrait filled with poise, great dignity and an illuminating resonance as the solitary artist in exile who finally has the occasion to unveil her talents in the kitchen, to please her public, no matter how uncomprehending they be. "You see her blossom in her craft, a craft she elevates into art," Ms. Audran said in an interview. "The two elderly sisters, they never lived, they slipped by their destinies. But Babette, she realized her destiny on this one night alone. It's a beautiful story. You just have to let your heart speak." That was precisely the approach of Gabriel Axel. He kept close to the original story, and he turned to Karen Blixen's text when he needed help. Ms. Audran said his knowledge of both French and Danish cultures created a chemistry when she came onto the set in Denmark very much the way Babette came to the elderly sisters. "Gabriel's enthusiastic, like an enchanted child, and that is very stimulating," she said. "There is no fear. He eases you into a state of total confidence. Actors, we're like children, you know. And he had such a love for this subject, there was necessarily a great joy in working with him to make Babette come alive." Much to Ms. Audran's regret, Babette was a project no French producer wanted to touch, for many of the same reasons as the traditional Danes: no overt sex, no violence, no immediate box-office appeal for young cinemagoers. "It's a shame, because this would have been a perfect co-production for the French," said Ms. Audran. "In France and elsewhere, there is a lot of talk about a crisis in the cinema. It is a crisis of producers and a crisis of quality. There can be no craft without love. It's a moral question." Yes, and precisely the moral question so delicately probed by Karen Blixen and Gabriel Axel. At the end of the story, the sisters worry that Babette had spent so much money for their sake. "For your sake?" replies Babette. "No. For my own. . . I am a great artist. . .A great artist, Mesdames, is never poor. We have something, Mesdames, of which other people know nothing." Copyright The New York Times Company