‘My Favourite Cake’ Review: From Iran, a Delectable Later-Life Love Story
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Like taxis on a rainy night, you wait for ages for a great, bittersweet film about love in late middle age with a side helping of gastronomic lusciousness — and then two come along at once. Tehran-set but internationally-produced comedy-drama My Favourite Cake premiered at the Berlin Film Festival a day after Valentine’s Day. That day just so happened to overlap with the release of French drama The Taste of Things in several key territories. (Taste opened in the U.S. on Feb. 9.)
Of course, writer-directors Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha‘s Berlinale competitor is very different from Tran Anh Hung’s period study starring Juliette Binoche and Benoit Magimel, but the two films overlap in fascinating ways. Both remind viewers of the ephemeral nature of all things. Both are sublime portraits of complicated, older souls, one of whom is an excellent cook who expresses love through food. And in both, the lead characters take daring risks in order to embrace pleasure, joy and love in ways that would scandalize the societies in which they live.
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There’s at least one big difference, though: In contemporary, theocratic Iran, where 70-year-old widow Mahin (Lily Farhadpour) and same-aged divorced taxi driver Faramarz (Esmaeil Mehrabi) live, their newly minted romance could get both of them, but especially Mahin, in deep trouble. Shot around the time when protests broke out nationwide over the fate of Mahsa Amini, who died in police custody after being arrested for not wearing her hijab properly, Cake crackles with the valiant, liberational energy of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, an attitude baked right into its bones.
To have even made such a film — where just for starters the female protagonist also refuses to hide all her hair under a hijab, and that’s before she invites an almost total stranger to come back to her place to spend the night — is an act of defiance in itself. Of course, the Iranian state has responded by refusing to grant travel visas to Moghaddam and Sanaeeha, who are unmarried life partners as well as collaborators, so they could attend the festival. (Their previous features are Ballad of a White Cow and Risk of Acid Rain.)
The film is exceedingly funny, even in translation, right up to the point where the tone shifts dramatically. Deeply endearing on every level, from its anti-authoritarian politics to its body positivity to general joie de vivre, this is a crowdpleaser through and through (unless the crowd happens to be made up of moral policemen and dogmatic clerics).
Told with crisp, comic precision over a tight 96 minutes, Cake opens with Mahin still in bed near noon, her usual MO as we later learn. Widowed some 30 years ago, she lives alone in a peaceful, airy apartment, generously appointed with a large walled garden. Her daughter lives abroad, and although she and Mahin talk regularly on the phone, it’s obvious the older woman, who used to work as a nurse, misses seeing her grandchildren grow up. At least she keeps up a bit with her female friends — all widows like herself — and her best friend Puran (Mansoureh Ilkhani) calls her every day, even if her conversation is mostly chiding Mahin for sleeping in all the time and complaining about her own bowel health.
At a lavish luncheon Mahin lays on for her golden-girl pals, the women debate the utility of having menfolk around, with some exulting in their freedom while others note guys can be useful around the house sometimes. This seems to stir up feelings in Mahin, who despite her poor knees takes a stroll in a local park one day, where she sees the moral police trying to arrest a young woman (Melika Pazoki) for not wearing her hijab properly. Mahin intervenes and just manages to avoid being arrested herself for the same crime.
All of this triggers a wave of nostalgia in Mahin. She remembers a time when she could wear a bathing suit on the beach (and was thin enough not to feel self-conscious), go see the latest pop singers in the Hyatt Regency’s ballroom, and mischievously steal plants from a local park on a lark with Puran without fear of imprisonment or worse. With all that at the back of her mind, she impulsively takes a fancy to Faramarz (veteran actor Mehrabi), a taxi driver she notices eating alone in a café who complains to friends at another table that he has no wife at home to make him supper. Drawn to his kindly face and amiable presentation, Mahin practically stalks him to the taxi stand he works out of and insists he drives her home. The two click, and Mahin suddenly invites him to come back to her place, making it clear with her big come-hither eyes that she might be offering more than just illicit wine, homemade food and the titular cake. With a delighted twinkle, he accepts.
Shot almost in real time that evokes Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset and other talky movie seductions, the back half of the film follows Mahin and Faramarz around her apartment as they get to know each other, growing ever more intoxicated with the backyard booze and the giddiness of their own audacity.
Moghaddam and Sanaeeha and the actors turn this set piece into a whirling dervish of elderly seduction, executed with crack comic timing, precise choreography for both the camera and the characters themselves, and one of the all-time great crash cuts. Clearly, it’s all too good to be true, but the looming sense of danger just makes the couple’s frenzied lunge for happiness seem all the sweeter. Some viewers may quibble that the final twist is problematic, but the dying fall of the epilogue buttons down an impressively succinct, tautly strung script. We can only hope that all involved in this remarkable, heady achievement will have a chance to seize more days with further films.
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