My Favourite Cake review – a charm­ing slice-of-life film

Liv­ing a rock-and-roll lifestyle, sleep­ing in ​’til noon, start­ing the day with black tea and cig­a­rettes, smear­ing on make-up with her fin­gers, Marin (Lili Farhad­pour) could be mis­tak­en for a woman half her age. But at 70 years old, she’s com­ing to terms with a body that is not as young as it once was, and a coun­try that is not as free as it used to be. Her hus­band has been dead for decades, her chil­dren have moved away, and her once-rau­cous friends now only meet up once a year, and give her a blood pres­sure mon­i­tor as an ear­ly birth­day present.

Stub­born­ly tak­ing her­self on a solo girl’s day out, she dis­cov­ers beyond her beau­ti­ful but remote home lies a coun­try she bare­ly recog­nis­es, a dis­con­nect that is both enter­tain­ing and dev­as­tat­ing. She rem­i­nisces in a hotel where she and her friends used to go danc­ing, only to find an emp­ty cof­fee shop (said in jar­ring Eng­lish with­in the Far­si dia­logue) where the wait­er offers her an unpro­nounce­able cofee she has nev­er heard of, and then asks her to scan a QR code to access the menu.

While this Amer­i­can­i­sa­tion and use of tech­nol­o­gy seems like a turn­ing point of moder­ni­ty, Marin’s youth­ful lib­er­al­ism is a rel­ic, as she lat­er res­cues a girl about to be arrest­ed by the Moral­i­ty Police for show­ing too much hair. Iran is no longer a place for spon­ta­neous romance, but when Marin comes across an elder­ly taxi dri­ver (Esmael Mehra­bi) and over­hears he is a bach­e­lor, she puts her­self out there and invites him home.

What ensues is a qui­et­ly rad­i­cal date, behind closed doors and away from pry­ing neigh­bours. As Marin and her new beau Fara­marz court awk­ward­ly, they open up about their lives, talk­ing of lost love and of a coun­try that isn’t kind to their desire for irre­li­gious joy. They enjoy dol­ma and get tip­sy in a secret gar­den shad­ed by cedars that Marin stole as seedlings from the park 30 years ago. Set­tling into domes­tic com­fort, as Fara­marz fix­es her out­door lights, Marin makes the tit­u­lar cake (orange blos­som and vanil­la crème) excit­ed at the prospect of some­one to share it with.

The star­ring actors play off one anoth­er beau­ti­ful­ly, clum­sy but earnest beyond their years and the cam­er­a­work reflects this new­found inti­ma­cy, weav­ing between them as they dance like nobody’s watch­ing, while the edit­ing main­tains the lev­i­ty with a par­tic­u­lar­ly incred­i­ble crash cut.

My Favourite Cake is a slice-of-life film with con­sid­ered dia­logue and heart­felt per­for­mances that unrav­els a cul­tur­al­ly spe­cif­ic repres­sion, one that got the Iran­ian film­mak­ers banned from France and Ger­many to edit and pro­mote this film, but also the more uni­ver­sal lone­li­ness of the elder­ly who still have more life to live.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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