Year:2024

Runtime: 97 minutes

Written and directed by: Maryam Moghaddam, Behtash Sanaeeha

Starring: Lily Farhadpour, Esmail Mehrabi

By Sarah Manvel

This love story between two lonely old people in modern day Tehran is very nearly an all-timer. Unfortunately it’s common globally to punish women for expressing sexual desire, especially if those women are not of an age that’s considered sexually attractive. Unfortunately it’s just as common for bad luck to ruin people’s chances for happiness before it’s even begun. Under repressive regimes bad luck is more common than not, but “My Favourite Cake” would have been an even better movie if it had dared a happy ending.

Mahin (Lily Farhadpour) is a seventy-year-old widow and retired nurse living alone in a nice apartment. Her daughter emigrated years ago and they’re in close phone contact but Mahin is too old to be granted a visa. Anyway the apartment building was built without permits and her tenancy is essentially squatters’ rights. She spends most of her time alone, cooking nice meals for herself and knitting a blanket for her grandson while she watches Turkish soap operas. But then she hosts her annual luncheon with four of her friends (and one of their mothers) at which the women discuss the possibilities of dating at their age. Mahin scoffs, but slowly begins to reconsider. (Especially since one of her friends brings a recording of her colonoscopy.) So Mahin gives herself a manicure, takes a taxi to the park, and instead of meeting a nice man ends up intervening when the morality police try to take away a young woman for having an inadequate hijab. The young woman is grateful, but also full of the condescension of youth, in that she doesn’t think it mattered if an old lady had gotten arrested for defying the laws of hijab too. Mahin’s feelings are hurt. She was brave, her feelings are valuable, and like the young woman she could too have a boyfriend if she wanted.

So she goes to a special cafeterias for pensioners, where meals are paid for with vouchers provided by the state, and listens to the old men talk. “Your face is more wrinkled than your balls,” one says to his friend before being shushed. But off to the side a man named Faramarz (Esmail Mehrabi) is eating alone because he doesn’t care for the rude men. He’s a taxi driver, and Mahin likes his face. So she engineers an excuse to get into his taxi – it takes hours – and wastes no time in inviting him over. He’s barely through the door before she brings out an absolutely enormous bottle of homemade wine she’s been saving for a special occasion. They toast, and Faramarz downs his glass in one. The regime of their country and its repression of human behaviour may be one thing, but the heart still wants what it wants. 

Mr Mehrabi is wonderful as someone who cannot believe his luck and therefore is willing to press it but only within the bounds of politeness and good care. He fixes the lights in Mahin’s garden to say thank you as she cooks the dinner, and he lets Mahin do the leading, to make sure she wants it. But this is Ms Farhadpour’s movie. Here we have a woman who had gotten used to her little life, her routines and her loneliness, to not knowing how to use much of her phone and to focus instead on her garden and her soaps. And suddenly, because of her boldness, she’s got a man alone in her apartment without the benefit of marriage, and they both know what they are risking, but suddenly it’s so wonderful they are going to risk it anyway. And it is wonderful, this unhoped-for happiness that’s suddenly right in their hands.

But then writer-directors Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha made something happen, and suddenly “My Favourite Cake” pivots from a heart-warming romance into a stone bummer. This is their method – their previous movie, “Ballad of a White Cow” (2020) which also played at the Berlinale, was about a woman who (for excellent reasons, but still) chose darkness over potential happiness. Here Mahin has that choice taken away from her, not that the darkness which follows is any less annihilating. The ending is highly memorable and very believable, but one wonders if it might have been a bolder choice to show that happiness is possible, even if you’re old, even if the life you’re forced to live is not normal. The trouble is of course is that might excuse the political system in Iran, which is not the creators’ aim in the slightest. But it would have been nice to pretend for a little longer that happiness was possible in any circumstances.