Autumnal romance blooms in My Favourite Cake, a film about seeking passion in life and being bold enough to act when opportunities arise. The directors are Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha, a duo whose previous work, Ballad of a White Cow, pointed to excessive measures in the Iranian legal system. Their latest has a lighter touch but is just as candid about the effect of authoritarian overreach on ordinary lives––a sentiment made all the more apparent when the directors were banned from attending the Berlinale premiere earlier this year as a result of scenes involving alcohol consumption and a character not wearing a hijab. The story is set in lovely, sun-kissed Tehran, a city that’s given us romantic cinema over the years, though rarely with such opprobrium.
The film’s unlikely lovers, Mahin and Faramarz, are beautifully played by Lili Farhadpour and Esmaeel Mehrabi––two veteran Iranian actors with 70-odd credits between them, together here for just the first time. Farhadpour’s Mahin takes the lead as a woman who decides to break her old routine and effectively goes out on the pull where she meets Faramarz, a lonely cab driver, and they enjoy a charming, romantic evening together. In terms of subgenres, Cake feels plucked from the same lineage that gave us Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry last year: a story of a stranger to passion cautiously dipping their toe in again.
Cake alters the playbook by making its protagonist not a passive actor in the story, but an instigator. Moghaddam and Sanaeeha allow the drama to play out over 24 hours, following Mahin as she attempts to find a date in spots she once frequented: a local bakery; a running spot in the park; the once-glamorous residents bar at a now-soulless chain hotel. (In an interesting aside, on this brief odyssey she encounters a protest and stops a young woman from being arrested by the morality police.) The film finds a much more interesting groove when she runs into Faramarz in the early evening, setting up a delightful second act that plays out in Mahin’s spacious apartment as they flirt and drink and dance together, flush from the effects of a rare drink and willing to let themselves go.
Travel bans notwithstanding, My Favourite Cake’s most effective transgression is allowing its elderly characters to be horny. That’s a topic you likely won’t find in another Iranian film this year. Just don’t go in expecting much provocation. Moghaddam and Sanaeeha obviously have things to say about the state of their country, but at heart this is a romantic, even nostalgic film. No more so than in that middle third where the filmmakers come into their own, unearthing remarkable depth in their characters with a sequence that seems to play out in real time, as if transported from a Richard Linklater movie: all long, unbroken takes and quiet, yearning revelations. It’s easy to get lost in.
My Favourite Cake screens at AFI Fest 2024.