A film that is gentle, delightful, and vitally important.
Iranian film-making duo Maryam Moghadam and Behtash Sanaeeha have impressive CVs both separately and together. Their latest project, My Favourite Cake has been shown to critical and audience acclaim in several festivals around the world, including our own Adelaide Film Festival. It now gets its well-deserved theatrical release in Australia.
Mahin is 70, widowed for 30 years, living alone in Tehran now that her children have left the country. She catches up with old friends once a year, but otherwise pursues a solitary life. Once afternoon, whilst eating in a cafe, her eye is caught by a man her own age, a divorced taxi driver called Faramarz. She follows him back to his taxi company and persuades him not just to drive her home, but to come in. So begins a night that will change both their lives.
Set against the background of the current oppressive Iranian regime, My Favourite Cake has politics baked into it: not with grand sweeping statements, but with the memories of older Iranians who remember what life was like before the 1979 revolution. This in itself is seen as so subversive that Moghadam and Sanaeeha are currently under travel bans and may end up facing jail sentences. This film is therefore vitally important both for its content and its context.
Don’t be scared off by though. Fundamentally this is a romance, and a splendid one at that. Gentle, warm, humorous, authentic, and quirkily sensual, the screenplay delights in exploring the banter that draws lovers together, as well as the shared experience of older people. Lili Farhadpour and Esmaeel Mehrabi as Mahin and Faramarz respectively, both revel in their roles, delivering nuanced and layered performances. And although the bulk of the film is just the two of them, the scene where Mahin has her friends to lunch is worth seeing in itself.
Some of the most exciting and fresh cinema is now coming out of countries with smaller international filmmaking profiles, such as Iran. My Favourite Cake is such a work.
Romantic, dramatic, comedic, and meticulously political, this is a must-see if you love great cinema.
My Favourite Cake opens on December 5th.
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