‘My Favourite Cake’: Berlin Review

Dirs/scr: Maryam Moghaddam, Behtash Sanaeeha. Iran/France/Sweden/Germany. 2024. 97mins

Since the death of her husband and her daughter’s emigration, 70-year-old Mahin (Lily Farhadpour) has lived by herself in a far-flung suburb of Tehran, with just her garden and gnawing loneliness for company. After lunch with her pensioner girlfriends, she decides to take matters into her own hands, striking up a conversation with elderly taxi driver Faramarz (Esmail Mehrabi). The spark between them ignites during an eventful stolen evening, in which Mahin reconnects with the freedoms and pleasures of her youth, experienced in a now unrecognisable Iran. 

Rich, frequently hilarious tragicomedy

This rich, frequently hilarious tragicomedy from Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha tackles the obstacles facing Iranian women when taking control of their destiny; it captures, with verve and humour, the joy and absurdity of life and death. The film’s premiere in Berlin’s Competition marks a return to the festival for Moghaddam and Sanaeeha, whose previous collaboration, Ballad Of A White Cow, also screened at the festival. 

The filmmakers, however, have not been allowed by the Iranian authorities to travel to Berlin. Their picture shows the consumption of alcohol (Mahin and Faramarz put a serious dent into a massive bottle of fortified wine) and a woman dancing, and it takes potshots at the mandatory hijab rule and the morality police, so it is unlikely that it will be shown domestically. Yet as a terrific, a bittersweet crowd-pleaser driven by two first-rate performances, My Favourite Cake should connect with arthouse audiences elsewhere. Deals have already been closed with multiple territories ahead of the picture’s premiere.

There is a superb scene near the beginning of the film that plays out, almost entirely, in Farhadpour’s expressive face. Mahin chats to her daughter on Facetime. She’s eager to discuss the lunch she prepared for her friends and share other details of her life. But her daughter, now in Europe, is juggling a fractious child’s bedtime routine and abruptly ends the call. Mahin is bereft. She lives comfortably, in a spacious apartment with a lush garden, but her emotional life is impoverished, reduced to scraps of contact. It is, she realises, not enough.

The changes she affects are small at first – she revisits a hotel where, before the revolution, she would wear high heels and a low-cut blouse to dance to live music. But now the menu is a QR code and her favourite coffee hasn’t been served in years. Everything conspires to make her feel like a relic. But there are also benefits to being old and pissed off – she faces down the morality police when they attempt to arrest a young woman in a park for failing to fully cover her hair.

Emboldened by her own daring, Mahin throws caution to the wind and makes it clear to Faramarz that she would like to get to know him. Bypassing peeping eyes, but still attracting the unwelcome attention of her nosy neighbour, Mahin manages to sneak Faramarz into her home. The ice doesn’t take long to break – the wine helps – and Mahin and Faramarz recognise in each other a need for human connection, a rebellious nature and a love of music; he once spent a month in prison for playing a tar (a Persian lute) in a wedding band.

They dance, and the camera spins with them, and, for a while, the atmosphere is giddy with hope and possibilities. But hope in a place like Iran is a fragile thing. Later on, in less jubilant circumstances, the camera turns again, in a slow, deliberate 360 pan that allows us to grasp, fully, the precarious nature of happiness.