17/02/2024 - BERLINALE 2024: Directorial duo Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha craft a straightforward but heartfelt dramedy of love and resistance against patriarchy in old age

Lily Farhadpour in My Favourite Cake

All eyes were on writer-directors Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha – or, rather, their absence – at the world premiere of their new film, My Favourite Cake [+see also:
trailer
film profile], which has just made its debut in the Competition section of the 2024 Berlinale. Making international headlines not of their own accord, the filmmaking duo’s passports were seized by the Iranian government and their travel to Berlin halted. Their 2020 film Ballad of a White Cow [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], too, premiered in the Competition strand of the Berlinale but remains banned in Iran. Nonetheless, their presence was felt through stars Lily Farhadpour and Esmail Mehrabi, as Farhadpour read a statement from the filmmakers at the press conference.

The film rests on a simple premise: encouraged by her fellow pensioner friends to pursue companionship and new romantic beginnings, 70-year-old widower Mahin (Farhadpour) decides to put herself out there again. A run-in with Iran’s morality police further reinvigorates Mahin’s confidence in standing up for what she believes in after she successfully defends a girl who is accused of not properly wearing her hijab. Learning that an elderly taxi driver named Faramarz (Mehrabi) is also unmarried, Mahin invites him over to her home and they share one glorious rollercoaster of an evening.

My Favourite Cake captures an impressive range of human emotions while drawing viewers in via an accessible style of humour and light situational comedy: Mahin’s friends joke about watching their colonoscopy footage and gift her a blood-pressure monitor as a birthday present. However, many of the beats fall into a formulaic narrative progression that, for some, may even make its drastic ending tonal shift seem predictable. The conventionality leads the film to drag at times and forces the story to lose some of its dramatic tension, despite its overall charm.

Cinematographer Mohammad Haddadi brings a sense of warm visual realism to the work, epitomised by a scene in which Mahin and Faramarz sit in the former’s garden, their figures gently framed by out-of-focus leaves and branches that appear to embrace their newfound intimacy. The camera never strays far from Mahin, allowing Farhadpour to shine as a sincere and relatable 70-year-old – she, too, sleeps in until noon and calls it waking up “at dawn”. The soundtrack filled with delightful Iranian oldies is complemented by Hossein Ghoorchian’s unobtrusive sound design, where a low drone buzzes threateningly during the film’s climax and a thumb harp pings a bittersweet tune at its close.

Viewers familiar with current events in Iran will recognise the political significance of Mahin’s boldness against the morality police. The film also holds more than meets the eye, where the politics of a late-night encounter between an unmarried man and woman, however unassuming, is also subject to censorship. My Favourite Cake is layered with aspects like this, including nostalgic mentions of the freedoms afforded in pre-revolution Iran, which add to the filmmakers’ resistive impulses. It resolutely joins a fresh wave of movies celebrating the conviviality and complexity of the lives of older women.

My Favourite Cake is a co-production between Iran’s Filmsazan Javan, France’s Caractères Productions, Sweden’s Hobab and Germany’s Watchmen Productions. Its international sales are managed by Paris-based Totem Films.

Photogallery 17/02/2024: Berlinale 2024 - My Favourite Cake

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Esmail Mehrabi, Lily Farhadpour
© 2024 Dario Caruso for Cineuropa - dario-caruso.fr, @studio.photo.dar, Dario Caruso