Old Yorker

  • My Favourite Cake

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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. …

     

  • Lee

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ellen Kuras (2023)

    Kate Winslet stars as the American photographer Lee Miller (1907-1977).  Director Ellen Kuras is also best known for camerawork – she was the cinematographer on such pictures as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Away We Go (2009) and A Little Chaos (2014).  (Winslet starred in the first and third of that trio, and was married to Sam Mendes at the time he made Away We Go.)  More recently, Kuras has directed television drama but this biopic is her first dramatic feature for cinema.  Lee ‘took eight years to make and, at one point, due to precarious funding, Kate Winslet (who also produced the movie) paid the entire cast and crew’s salaries for two weeks’ (Wikipedia).  The project clearly meant a lot to Winslet:  it’s a shame the result isn’t better.

    In the 1920s Lee Miller was a sought-after fashion model in New York but her father had already introduced her to photography and she travelled to Paris, just before the turn of the decade, to study with Man Ray, whose lover and muse she also became.  During the 1930s she pursued her work in painting and photography, moved in premier-league European cultural circles (her friends numbered Picasso and Cocteau), married briefly and travelled widely – none of which foretold her transformation in the early 1940s into a front-line war photographer.  Lee’s narrative focuses on this pivotal time in Miller’s life, moving from shortly before the outbreak of World War II to just after its end.  The framing device is an interview, taking place at her Sussex home in the last year of her life, between Lee and a young man (Josh O’Connor) who remains unnamed for most of the film.  Kuras and the screenwriters (Liz Hannah, John Collee and Marion Hume) don’t have any idea of how to give the core material dramatic shape:  the main narrative is one-thing-after-another stuff.  The dialogue, adequate at best, turns embarrassingly tin-eared whenever the likes of Lee, Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgård) and Paul Éluard (Vincent Colombe) start deploring what the Nazis are doing.

    Kate Winslet nevertheless gives (yet) another good performance – even though (and even allowing for how long Lee was in production) she’s seldom playing a woman of her own actual age, which is nearly forty-nine.  We first meet the heroine at a bohemian lunch gathering on the Côte d’Azur in 1938, when Lee Miller was only thirty-one; she’s seventy in the Sussex sequences.  Winslet is particularly convincing as the elderly woman.  It may have helped that she spends most of these scenes sitting down, minimising the scope for geriatric hobbling that younger actors are often tempted into; but her expression of a wary, weary quality, through her eyes and her facial movements, is impressive.  She’s helped, too, by three strong contributions in the supporting cast though none is problem-free.  From an early stage, there’s more going on emotionally under the surface of scenes between Winslet and Josh O’Connor than in the supposed meat of the story that Ellen Kuras is telling.  For as long as O’Connor’s character seems to be a writer interviewing Lee Miller in a professional capacity, this is tantalising.  But his question to her about motherhood prompts a strikingly defensive answer and a hastily suppressed guilty look from Lee.  And when she invites him to talk about his mother and he gets flustered, the penny drops:  the young man is no outsider but Antony Penrose, Lee’s only child.  This exposes the earlier scenes between them, with the son taking notes as if he were a journalist, as a bit of a cheat.  In the closing scene, he stands looking out of the window before turning back to discover an empty room.  This revelation that his mother is already dead comes with the sound not of a penny dropping but of a leaden cliché clunking into Lee.

    The lunch party at the start of the film is the occasion of Lee’s introduction to Roland Penrose, who would become her life partner and, in 1947, her second husband.  Their first conversation is a verbal sparring match:  Lee, as she gets more irritated, takes aim at Penrose’s privileged place in the English class system.  It doesn’t help that the Swedish actor playing him is trying hard to sound upper-crust English but not quite getting there yet there’s a real spark between Kate Winslet and Alexander Skarsgård:  that Lee and Roland are hot for each other comes through convincingly.  Skarsgård manages to make Roland Penrose interesting despite the script’s reductive portrayal of him.  The writers seem to share Lee’s initial prejudice:  you wouldn’t guess that Penrose was, as well as a wealthy art collector, an influential public voice on behalf of the Surrealists (and co-founder of London’s Institute for Contemporary Arts).  Once Lee is working as a war correspondent and photographer, Roland appears only to mansplain why she should return home, and fails in his mission.  After the War, Skarsgård has even less to do:  in the couple’s Hampstead home he hands Lee an envelope containing a copy of Vogue then leans on a kitchen chair waiting for her to erupt when she discovers the magazine has omitted her photographs from Buchenwald and Dachau.

    Audrey Withers, the Vogue editor of the time, is well played by Andrea Riseborough.  She has to share her first scene with Samuel Barnett’s crudely camp cameo of Cecil Beaton; once he’s out of the way, Riseborough conjures up a vivid, emotionally alert character – remarkably so, given how little she’s given to work with.  She and Winslet are stranded, though, in the stupidly conceived big scene between Audrey and Lee.  We’ve seen that Lee has been able to telephone Audrey from overseas during the War but a phone call is clearly out of the question when both are in post-war London.  Lee hasn’t therefore been told that the Vogue powers-that-be deem her concentration camp images too grim for readers.  She marches into the Vogue offices, riffles through a filing cabinet, locates her photographs and starts destroying them, while Audrey makes futile attempts to assure Lee that she (Audrey) fought for the images to be published.  Lee then switches to quieter recollection of being sexually abused as a girl before complaining bitterly that ‘they keep getting away with it’.  She seems to be saying that her own childhood experience and the Nazi genocide are exactly equivalent – a suggestion offensive to abuse survivors, to Holocaust victims and perhaps also to Lee Miller, for being attributed to her.

    Lee‘s big moments are repeatedly botched.  Walking through Paris in the immediate aftermath of the Liberation, Lee finds her old friend Solange d’Ayen (Marion Cotillard), aristocrat and journalist, in dire straits, sweeping the floor in her once-lavish home with only a broom for company.  Lee hugs Solange and exclaims at her wasted appearance (Cotillard is even more wasted in a feeble role).  A couple of scenes later, Lee wanders into a church where the wedding of Paul and Nusch Éluard (Noémie Merlant) is happening: another hug.  We don’t know if Lee knew about the wedding in advance or if this is a chance meeting, ie a clumsy way of showing what has happened to two more of the pre-war Côte d’Azur lunch party.  Lee’s photojournalist colleague David Scherman (Andy Samberg), who works alongside her in Paris then in Germany, is Jewish and understandably overcome by some of what they see and photograph.  When he weeps what can Lee do but hug him, too?

    I’m sarcastically labouring the point because these embraces are one of several symptoms of Lee’s jarring modernity.  Just as it’s doubtful that hugs of compassion were as routine in the 1940s as they are now, so it’s certain that smoking was more popular then.  The film reflects that:  Lee, in particular, smokes furiously – but that’s the trouble.  Kate Winslet, using cigarettes to express her character’s anger or anxiety, proves that even a top-class actor struggles today to make smoking look natural.  (Now that researching a role is standard practice you’d think actors would watch old films featuring plenty of real-life smokers for instruction.)   I think the egregious reference to the sexual abuse that Lee suffered is another example of the modernising tendency.  In a mainstream film biography of the 2020s, if there’s any kind of evidence of such abuse it must be mentioned – never mind how hard it was to mention in the era in which the film is set, never mind how awkwardly it’s forced into the narrative.

    The scenes at the recently liberated concentration camps are poorly and evasively staged.  Ellen Kuras has her DP, Pawel Edelman, show piles of corpses at Buchenwald and Dachau at some distance from the camera, the images slightly blurred.  We’re meant to feel the horror of what Lee and David Scherman are witnessing through their covering of their faces to cope with the death-stench (though we’re more likely to be puzzled as to why they can’t manage to attach the face coverings properly and keep struggling with them).  When Lee takes photographs inside a cattle wagon its inhabitants are arranged there just as they need to be to give her a good vantage point for the shot.  In one of the camps, Lee comes upon a young girl who recoils in fear as she approaches.  The girl is a prettified representation of suffering:  she’s pale, slender, melancholy but not skeletal; when she takes the hunk of dry bread proffered by Lee she suggests uncertainty rather than animal hunger.  There’s no denying that this aesthetic pussyfooting is something of a relief for the viewer; no denying either that letting us off so lightly is a moral failure on Kuras’s part.

    A Google search for Lee Miller quickly brings up the notorious photograph in the bathroom of Adolf Hitler’s Munich apartment, taken by David Scherman on the last day of April 1945 (by remarkable coincidence, the date of Hitler’s suicide).  Miller, unclothed, sits up in the bath, a photograph of Hitler on a ledge to her left, the shower hose behind her head, the fatigues and army boots she had just worn in Dachau in front of the bath, dirt from the boots blackening the bathmat.  The film’s account of Lee and David’s visit to the apartment is even more bizarre than it should be.  When they arrive, an Allied drinks party seems to be in full swing.  Lee and David make a beeline for the bathroom; it’s hard to tell if this is because they badly need to use the facilities or because the photographs they will take there are pre-planned.  Kate Winslet has one of her best bits during this sequence – raucous laughter as Lee smashes the glass of the framed photograph of Hitler, the vindictive way she grinds dirt into the mat.  But the ending of the episode is comically bathetic.  Lee and David emerge from the bathroom to an empty apartment.  They don’t even seem to notice that everyone else has cleared out.

    16 September 2024

Posts navigation