Mahin’s buddy Pouran likes speaking about her illnesses, actual and imagined. More than that, she has one thing on her cellphone she is eager to indicate the women gathered for certainly one of their common lunches at Mahin’s place: the movie she made from her colonoscopy. “That’s disgusting,” snorts Mahin (Lily Farhadpour). “I told her to marry! You wouldn’t be like this if you had!” Another of their wrinkly gang chips in. “What joy did our dead husbands ever bring us?” They all snicker, companionably.
They’re a energetic lot on this heat Iranian drama, teasing one another about their incontinence and expired marriages. Mahin has little persistence for such ailment discuss, however she admits she sleeps badly. What she won’t confess is that she wakes up and watches trashy cleaning soap operas. She even places on make-up, all the higher to empathise with the small-screen {couples} bewitch and betray one another. Her upstairs neighbor is a self-appointed scout for Teheran’s Morality Police. She doesn’t need to give her any ammunition.
Mahin is 70, sufficiently old to recollect occasions when you might go for a stroll with a person within the park, or put on your hijab pushed again over your hair with out being pulled right into a police wagon. She can also be sufficiently old to throw warning to the winds; when she sees a younger girl being harassed, she intervenes, barks on the police till they depart and tells her new younger buddy to be courageous. Presumably she has given herself the identical recommendation when she goes to the pensioners’ low cost restaurant for lunch on her personal, overhears an aged taxi driver inform the opposite males that he’s there between jobs as a result of he has no one at house to prepare dinner for him and decides to take the bull by the horns.
She goes to the taxi stand to search out him, asks him to take her house and invitations him in. She modifications her frock, cooks dolmades and brings out her secret stash of wine. Faramarz (Esmail Mehrabi) tells her he used to make his personal wine and bury it in barrels within the again backyard. As they eat dinner on the terrace, by the sunshine of lamps Faramarz has simply managed to repair, Mahin says she had forgotten how pretty it might be to eat dinner exterior.
Watching these two aged individuals indulge of their tiny, innocent however unlawful pleasures is a delight. Nothing is airbrushed: Lily Farhadpour is a big girl, faintly absurd in her outmoded night attire, however it’s totally convincing when Faramarz tells her gallantly that her physique is ideal. She makes all of the strikes and her illicit boldness, on this subdued world, is quietly thrilling. Is it actually all proper if he stays the night time? he asks. “Do you need to ask again?” she smiles. They don’t fake to sexual stress, however there’s a tangible affinity from the second they first sit within the cab collectively. Both actors appear lit from inside, radiant with renewed life. Would two individuals who have been alone for 30 years bond so readily? Of course. In a society the place even senior women and men can’t be seen collectively, there is no such thing as a room for hesitation.
Directors Behtash Sanaeeha and Maryam Moghaddam have peppered this mild story with pointed jibes on the Iranian regime, making no bones about the truth that enjoyable stopped with the Islamic Revolution. The feared Morality Police are undisguised thugs, the officers of this grim authorities so punitive that Mehan can’t even get a visa to go to her daughter abroad. And but its reigning temper is certainly one of wistfulness, summoned by the photographs of long-ago seaside holidays on Mahin’s partitions; she might have emigrated together with her daughter years in the past, however she is resigned to this decreased life within the nation that’s will at all times be house.
My Favorite Cake was made with official permission, however it’s no shock that it has since been deemed so incendiary that the administrators had been denied passports to permit them to journey to the pageant; the 2 lead actors have come with out them. This is hardly a cheerful ending for a three-year undertaking that was clearly a labor of appreciable love, each for the nation and these characters. They should not allowed a cheerful ending both, which speaks to the integrity of the undertaking. To give in to that narrative temptation — to say that every thing might work out properly — would simply be a lie.
Title: My Favorite Cake
Festival: Berlin (Competition)
Sales agent: Totem Films
Directors/screenwriters: Maryam Moghaddam, Behtash Sanaeeha
Cast: Lily Farhadpour, Esmail Mehrabi
Running time: 1 hr 37 min
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