‘My Favorite Cake’ Review: This 70-Year-Old Iranian Woman’s Love Story Is A Subversive Delight – Berlin Film Festival

Mahin’s friend Pouran likes talking about her ailments, real and imagined. More than that, she has something on her phone she is keen to show the ladies gathered for one of their regular lunches at Mahin’s place: the film she made of 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 laugh, companionably.

They’re a lively lot in this warm Iranian drama, teasing each other about their incontinence and expired marriages. Mahin has little patience for such ailment talk, but she admits she sleeps badly. What she will not confess is that she wakes up and watches trashy soap operas. She even puts on make-up, all the better to empathise with the small-screen couples bewitch and betray each other. Her upstairs neighbor is a self-appointed scout for Teheran’s Morality Police. She doesn’t want to give her any ammunition.

Mahin is 70, old enough to remember times when you could go for a walk with a man in the park, or wear your hijab pushed back over your hair without being pulled into a police wagon. She is also old enough to throw caution to the winds; when she sees a young woman being harassed, she intervenes, barks at the police until they leave and tells her new young friend to be brave. Presumably she has given herself the same advice when she goes to the pensioners’ cheap restaurant for lunch on her own, overhears an elderly taxi driver tell the other men that he is there between jobs because he has nobody at home to cook for him and decides to take the bull by the horns.

She goes to the taxi stand to find him, asks him to take her home and invites him in. She changes her frock, cooks dolmades and brings out her secret stash of wine. Faramarz (Esmail Mehrabi) tells her he used to make his own wine and bury it in barrels in the back garden. As they eat dinner on the terrace, by the light of lamps Faramarz has just managed to fix, Mahin says she had forgotten how lovely it could be to eat dinner outside.

Watching these two elderly people indulge in their tiny, harmless but illegal pleasures is a delight. Nothing is airbrushed: Lily Farhadpour is a large woman, faintly absurd in her outmoded evening dresses, but it is entirely convincing when Faramarz tells her gallantly that her body is perfect. She makes all the moves and her illicit boldness, in this subdued world, is quietly thrilling. Is it really all right if he stays the night? he asks. “Do you need to ask again?” she smiles. They don’t pretend to sexual tension, but there is a tangible affinity from the moment they first sit in the cab together. Both actors seem lit from within, radiant with renewed life. Would two people who have been alone for 30 years bond so readily? Of course. In a society where even senior men and women cannot be seen together, there is no room for hesitation.

Directors Behtash Sanaeeha and Maryam Moghaddam have peppered this gentle story with pointed jibes at the Iranian regime, making no bones about the fact that fun stopped with the Islamic Revolution. The feared Morality Police are undisguised thugs, the officials of this grim government so punitive that Mehan can’t even get a visa to visit her daughter overseas. And yet its reigning mood is one of wistfulness, summoned by the images of long-ago seaside holidays on Mahin’s walls; she could have emigrated with her daughter years ago, but she is resigned to this reduced life in the country that is will always be home.

My Favorite Cake was made with official permission, but it is no surprise that it has since been deemed so incendiary that the directors were denied passports to allow them to travel to the festival; the two lead actors have come without them. This is hardly a happy ending for a three-year project that was clearly a labor of considerable love, both for the country and these characters. They are not allowed a happy ending either, which speaks to the integrity of the project. To give in to that narrative temptation — to  say that everything could work out nicely — would just 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