My Favourite Cake
Keyk e mahbub e man
Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha (2024)
An unexpected romance between two elderly lonely-hearts, set in present-day Tehran. Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha first describe the routines and isolation of the main character – seventy-year-old widow Mahin (Lily Farhadpour), a retired nurse. Her only child moved some years ago to Europe, where she’s raising a family: Mahin rarely sees her daughter or granddaughter except on a phone screen. For a while, My Favourite Cake seems excessively unassuming though it’s enlivened by Lily Farhadpour’s acting and by what, for most Western viewers, will be instructive details about modern Iran – for example, the Tehran eateries catering exclusively for senior citizens. The writer-directors (who are a married couple) gradually illustrate Mahin’s discontent, expressed in nostalgia and as more active resistance to the world she inhabits. She’s despondent when she visits a hotel where, before the 1979 revolution, she used to dance in high heels and a low-cut blouse; the place no longer serves the coffee she used to like and the menu is now a QR code. Walking in a park, she has a go at the morality police trying to arrest a young woman who has failed to fully cover her hair. But My Favourite Cake isn’t very eventful until Mahin meets Faramarz (Esmail Mehrabi).
She sees him in one of the ‘pensioners’ restaurants’ (Mahin has coupons she can use there) and overhears his conversation with other male diners. ‘You must be doing well if you can afford to eat out every day,’ they say. ‘You all have wives and home-cooked meals,’ he replies. Faramarz is a taxi driver and Mahin contrives to be his passenger for a journey from the city centre back to her suburban home. On the way, she learns that he’s an ex-soldier; like Mahin, he’s seventy and was once married; unlike her, his marriage ended in divorce and he’s childless. Faramarz is surprised but clearly pleased by Mahin’s invitation to her house. Does she mean right now, he asks? Whenever suits you, she answers. He says now is fine. Well aware that it would be unwise for them to be seen entering her home together, she tells him to park a block away, make his own way to the house and come in through a back entrance, all of which he does.
From the moment Mahin gets in the cab and starts up a conversation, she and Faramarz get on like a house on fire. By the time he arrives at her place, she has changed into something like a party dress; he tells her how pretty she looks. She plies him with wine, from a bottle she hasn’t touched in a long time, and savoury food that she prepares. While he mends the broken lights in her garden, she starts to bake a cake. They eat and drink in the garden, talk and delight in each other’s company. Mahin puts on a favourite piece of music and they dance together. Faramarz is too intoxicated to drive home. He asks to use Mahin’s shower and then if she’ll shower with him. She says no, that she’s old and fat and ashamed to show her body. There are a fair few amusing bits in the film. The highlight is a cut to inside the bathroom, revealing the couple sitting side by side under the shower – fully dressed, soaking wet, quietly euphoric.
The mutual attraction between them is so strong and its momentum so unstoppable that by this stage you’ve intuited that My Favourite Cake will be a seize-the-day story of a peculiarly literal kind – that the day the couple meets will be the only day they can seize. Moghaddam and Sanaeeha prepare the ground for this. On the journey back from the city centre, Faramarz needs to call in at a pharmacy to pick up medication. Getting up from his chair at Mahin’s, he staggers before laughing that he’s just not used to alcohol these days. Before they dance, he goes to the bathroom: out of Mahin’s sight, he suddenly looks desperate. At one point their conversation turns to dying and she asks if he fears death. He replies that he doesn’t but that he is frightened of dying alone. After his shower, Mahin gives Faramarz some dry clothes, which presumably belonged to her late husband. While he dresses in the bedroom, she’s in the kitchen putting the finishing touches to her cake. Mahin explains that she keeps making it – an orange-blossom cake with vanilla cream – in the hope someone will share it with her. Now that has happened. ‘What a celebration!’ she exclaims. Faramarz doesn’t reply so Mahin goes to the bedroom. When she sees him out for the count she smiles and tells him, ‘It’s not bedtime yet’.
Faramarz’s sudden death and its aftermath were doubly problematic for me. One problem was, I now realise, a simple misunderstanding. Faramarz tells Mahin that a day that began miserably for him is ending joyfully: he’d woken feeling there was no point to life when every day was the dreary same. Has he perhaps taken an overdose – taken advantage, that is, of being in warm, comforting company to ensure that he doesn’t die alone? Does that explain his despairing expression in the bathroom, where he takes his medication? An overdose feels a stronger possibility when Mahin discovers the foil of tablets and gives Faramarz’s corpse a hard stare. On the other hand, it doesn’t look as though he has taken more than one or two tablets; it also seems improbably selfish and unkind of him to leave Mahin with his body on her hands. An exchange on Reddit (details in footnote[1]) gave me a satisfying explanation for all this. Forget the suicide theory.
The other problem isn’t so forgettable. Appalled and deeply distressed, Mahin repeatedly checks for signs of life and makes prolonged attempts to resuscitate Faramarz. This grimly realistic sequence is an awkward fit with the charmingly improbable whirlwind courtship that has preceded it. Next morning Mahin is in her garden; she’s silent while a man, whom she has evidently contacted, chatters away as he digs a large, deep hole in the garden. Once he has gone, Mahin returns to the bedroom, where she prepares Faramarz for burial. Before wrapping his body in a sheet, she puts in his mouth a small piece of the cake. She then drags the corpse from the bed, through the house, into the garden; heaves it into the pit; covers the newly-dug grave with earth. The effort involved leaves Mahin out of breath but that’s a small concession to credibility. It’s implausible that, hefty as she is, she’s capable of doing all this unaided.
This is an impressive film, though. It’s beautifully acted by the two principals, especially Lily Farhadpour. In Faramarz’s company, Mahin is transformed from the glum, trudging figure of the early scenes into a beaming, buoyantly busy woman. She becomes physically freer – in an almost literal sense enlightened; this makes her eventual reversion to gloom all the more poignant. Esmail Mehrabi, who is able to suggest how long Faramarz’s vitality has been withering but that it’s not quite extinguished, is a fine partner for Farhadpour. Moghaddam and Sanaeeha dramatise Mahin’s loneliness skilfully – particularly in an early sequence where she’s hosting lunch for a group of her women friends, most of them more or less the same age as her: it’s in this talkative company that Mahin’s isolation comes through most strongly. A phone exchange with her daughter, which the latter brings to an abrupt end, makes the same point more obviously but effectively. The directors cleverly link Faramarz’s solitary way of life and the lack of impact his disappearance will have on anyone except the boss of the taxi firm. It’s the care that Mahin takes to keep Faramarz’s visit secret – she has an explanation ready in order to dispatch the nosy neighbour who briefly interrupts proceedings – that allows her to give him a lasting home in the garden of which she’s so proud and that he so admires.
My Favourite Cake is an unusual combination. On the one hand, the late-life-romance scenario has inclined some reviewers to admire it in rather condescending terms – as gentle, lovely, heart-warming, and so on. On the other hand, as a piece of Iranian cinema that made it to this year’s Berlinale (where it won two jury prizes), the film must be taken seriously. Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaaeha couldn’t attend its premiere in Berlin. In an interview with Thomas Flew for Sight and Sound (October 2024), the couple explained why:
‘Eventually, [the government] heard about this [feature] film being made with just a short film permit and they raided our editor’s house. … We were lucky that, before the raid, we had sent a rough cut to our post-production studio in Paris. When we left to go there and finish the film, our passports were confiscated. They interrogated us and started a court case against us. … [We have been charged with] propaganda against the regime. And also breaking the Islamic rules by showing a woman without a hijab, and a woman and a man drinking alcohol and dancing together. …’
I’m glad I was able to watch the film unaware of this: foreknowledge of the film-makers’ situation would likely have made me see My Favourite Cake through an almost entirely political lens, at the expense of appreciating its artistry. I’m grateful that I can reflect on it in both these aspects. The closing image is a fine example of how successfully they are combined. Mahin, facing away from the camera, sits in her garden. Just the set of her shoulders, thanks to Lily Farhadpour, seems to convey what the woman is feeling. Keeping the camera on the back of her head for several seconds, stresses that her hair is uncovered.
17 September 2024
[1] Q: Has anyone watched this film? It was so stunning and I’ve been thinking about it alot [sic], and I’m desperate to find out what pills Faramarz was taking. Was it for [erectile dysfunction]? Was it for an existing health problem? And I know this uncertainty may be part of the whole unforeseeability/shock of it all but I for some reason can’t get my mind off it. It doesn’t help that I don’t know Persian to have immediately caught what was written on the packet.
A: They were blue pills, so I assumed it was viagra and his heart didn’t handle it well, considering his age. The reaction of a lady after finding said pills also suggested that, she sighed as if she understood immediately what happened. …