Mahin decides to break her loneliness by searching for a partner in Maryam Moghadam & Behtash Sanaeeha's warm-hearted drama “My Favourite Cake”. The third directorial collaboration between two filmmakers had its world premiere in the official competition of Berlinale earlier this year, screened in absence of the helmers who were not allowed to leave the country. The movie shows women without mandatory hijabs, it lets them speak about their flirts, dreams and longing, and it even involves alcohol drinking and a burgeoning love affair between two people who were not destined to live that dream to the fullest, as well as an open rebellion against the morality police. Iranian authorities made a clumsy attempt at stopping the film of reaching the international audience, which luckily proved futile.”My Favourite Cake” was shot secretly amidst the wide-spread anti Government protests sparked by the death of Mahsa (Jina) Amini, a young Iranian woman who was arrested by the morality police for not wearing hijab correctly.
My Favourite Cake screened at Red Lotus Asian Film Festival Vienna
Seventy-year old widow Mahin (Lili Farhadpour) fights insomnia by binge-watching soap operas on TV late at night in her tastefully furnished apartment in the suburb of Tehran, isolated from her besties who all live more central. Her biggest joy is tending to her beautiful garden, fortunately well-sheltered from the eyes of her inquisitive neighbour who lives upstairs – a nosy woman, who married to a conservative man working for the Iranian government and feels it's her duty to check on suspicious behavior in the building to eventually report it.
After thirty years since her husband's passing, with children and grandchildren living in Sweden, Mahin feels a pressing loneliness that she is barely conscious until the day when all her friends gather at the feast she has prepared for the event. Good food and tea spark lively conversations about life after marriage (all of them are widowed), and if such a union makes sense at all (“most of them are useless”, one of them utters, saying how having a man in the house only makes sense if something needs to be repaired). Gradually, some of them open up about their flirts and secret boyfriends, advising Mahin to find another husband or at least a companion. She stays quiet, but visibly intrigued by her friends' experiences. All the pretty dresses her daughter has been sending her the past years get taken out of the closet and closely inspected, and the soap opera evenings start serving as a rehearsal for beauty interventions: manicure, make-up and hair care.
The septuagenarians' reunion is the film's highlight. Laced with humor, it bursts with optimism that raises hopes of a happy ending. Brilliant is the actress who slips into the role of Mahin's best hypochondriac friend Pouran who can't stop talking about her long list of illnesses (she insists of showing a video of her colonoscopy to the gathered lot). She is the only one not partaking in conversations about love, worried that the next illness will certainly be the end of her.
In a place where finding a partner isn't a problem related to age, but to gender and the enforcement of a public moral code, with the morality police patrolling the streets to crack down on violations of the country's mandatory hijab rules and inappropriate clothing, even unmarried seniors of opposite sex can not be seen together. This doesn't stop Mahin to venture to various places to find a potential partner. She belongs to the generation of women who walked the streets dressed as it pleased them, who could attend concerts and sunbathe on the beach in bathing suits. That life lived before the Islamic revolution gives her courage to defend young girls from the morality police in the park, and to even advise one of them how to resist them in the future.
“My Favourite Cake” takes a step further towards the liberation of its lead character on her quest to find a man. After visiting places she knew from her past life – including a coffee place in the former Hyatt hotel where she is (to her horror) asked to scan a QR code to make an order – proves to be bizarrely empty of people, she walks into one of the few places where she can use the meal vouchers for pensioners. It is there she will notice a solitary man Faramarz (Esmail Mehrabi) who refuses to sit with a group of four men he obviously knows well. When asked if he is that wealthy if he can afford to eat in the restaurant each day he answers that unlike all of them, he has nobody who cooks for him, and Mahin, a passionate cook, feels an immediate attraction to this unknown man
Intrigued and driven by a decision to change her life, she will trace Faramarz at the taxi of the company he is working for and boldly invite him to come to her apartment. Their brief moments of joy, including drinking wine she's been keeping for decades hidden in her kitchen, dancing and singing together, and finally having a shower together fully clothed slouched on the bathroom floor due to tipsiness, will end way too soon. But before that, Mahin – a plump woman insecure about her body image and shy by nature, will get the praise about her looks she has probably never heard before.
The on-screen chemistry between Farhadpour and Mehrabi is mesmerizing, and the camera work by the DoP Mohamad Hadadi brings that dynamic to life.
“My Beautiful Cake” had its Austrian premiere at the sold out screening at Red Lotus Asian Film Festival in Vienna, as the only Iranian film in the program.
