Film Notes

My Favourite Cake review – charming portrayal of a 70-year-old Iranian’s appetite for romance.

Heroine Mahin (Lily Farhadpour) is fiercely determined to revitalise her mundane existence and taste a better life.

As well as everything else, this wonderfully sweet and funny film will contribute to the debate about whether repressive regimes are the nursery of artistic greatness. The Iranian government has prevented the film’s two directors, Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha, from travelling to Berlin to attend their own premiere; six months ago, their production offices were raided and computers and hard drives confiscated. But, fortunately, the film-makers had a copy stored in another country, and the film’s gentle humanity is a compelling rebuke to this fatuous, clumsy repression.

The authorities had apparently got wind of scenes in which women show their hair, and do not wear the hijab with enough modesty; the morality police drive around Tehran intimidating them with self-important purpose. The 70-year-old heroine – who wistfully remembers a time when hijabs were not required at all – stands up to these uniformed bullies and rescues a woman from their clutches.

This is Mahin (a lovely performance from Lili Farhadpour), whose story is a meditation on love and loss, loneliness and old age, and on the price at which long-term married happiness is bought. It is a meditation on how women come to terms with the destiny of widowhood, of knowing that they will almost certainly outlive their husbands. Mahin is herself a widow whose daughter and grandchildren live abroad, and her muted existence alone in her apartment is revealed in a series of tremendously composed tableaux. There are FaceTime phone calls with her daughter which somehow never allow for a proper talk. She has difficulty getting to sleep and doesn’t get up before noon. She waters the plants in her garden, goes shopping and occasionally hosts lunches for her female friends, at which the dominant theme is everyone’s various ailments, discussed at hilarious and explicit length.

But the conversation turns to whether it is possible to find romance again at their age. Why not? And so Mahin, without quite admitting it to herself, expands and modifies her aimless daytime schedule with a secret end in view: to meet a man. Mahin hangs out in the bakery queue, at the park, at a fancy hotel coffee shop and finally at a modest restaurant where pensioners’ food vouchers can be redeemed. And she finds herself meeting cute with Faramarz (Esmaeel Mehrabi), a modest, personable single man of her age. He is a cab driver and military veteran, who himself is of Mahin’s independent cast of mind: he got into trouble with joyless authorities for playing a musical instrument in a wedding band.

And so Faramarz and Mahin have their moment together at her apartment, where she offers to bake him her favourite cake. It is a moment of emotional connection for which they have saved up all their thoughts and feelings since becoming single – as if the entirety of their late-life inner existences are now being poured out to each other. There is something quietly magnificent in it. Moments like these in life are poignantly brief – but many never have them at all. It’s a lovely film.

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian, 16 February 2024. 

My Favourite Cake: an Iranian widow finds sweet rebellion in this gentle romantic comedy.

A 70-year-old widow in Tehran shakes up her predictable existence when she pursues a relationship with a lonely taxi driver in Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha‘s defiant late-in-life romance.

After a long day, 70-year-old Mahin (Lily Farhadpour) is getting ready for bed. Preparing to brush her teeth, she appraises herself in the mirror. Squinting, she smudges turquoise eyeshadow over her eyelids. Better? Not quite. Sighing, she dots lipstick on to her cheekbones, rubbing it in with the back of her hands, and applying the coral to her lips. Her expression is sceptical, and then defeated. She retreats to the sofa, passing out in front of the TV.

A middle-class widow in Tehran who has spent the last 30 years single, Mahin’s day-to-day involves waking up at noon, watering her plants and throwing dinner parties for her girlfriends (“the old gals”). In the evenings, she watches romantic dramas and knits. As her friends tell her, over platters of watermelon, no man means no man to look after: it’s not a bad life. But it’s not an exciting one either, as Mahin flies under the radar, avoiding the watchful gaze of both the morality police and her neighbours.

Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha’s gentle romantic comedy dares to ask if Mahin actually wants to move through life unnoticed. Frustration flashes across Farhadpour’s expressive face as her grown-up daughter tells her to wear her nice clothes “at home”. It’s a far cry from the plunging necklines and sky-high heels of her youth, which she describes nostalgically to a local cab driver. Mahin is wistful for an out-of-reach sexuality, knowing that it is also out of bounds. At the local bakery, she attempts to flirt with a stranger, moving in just that little bit too close.

She’s dismissed as a cuddly grandma, even as she muscles in to protect two young women in hijabs from a police officer. “You’d kill them over a few strands of hair?” she growls, as the young women cower, heavy fringe and pink hair peeking out from underneath their headscarves. Afterwards, one of the girls remarks that at Mahin’s age, that kind of sexism “doesn’t really affect you”.

Keenly aware of her dwindling sexual capital, and no longer accepting of it, Mahin takes herself to a pensioners’ cafe for lunch. It’s there she encounters taxi driver Faramarz (Esmaeil Mehrabi). When she overhears that he’s single and lives alone, she books a cab ride home with him, and strikes up a conversation. Emboldened by the pathetic fallacy (outside, summer rain pours) and Faramarz’s open, affable demeanour, Mahin invites him back to her place, where a romantic evening unfolds.

The film keeps pace with their date, Before Sunrise style, camera tightening as the conversation becomes more intimate. It’s only at this point – halfway through the film – that the couple reveal their ages. Possibly, Moghaddam and Sanaeeha withhold this fact in order to encourage audiences to work out how old they think these characters are. The divorced, twinkly-eyed Faramarz praises Mahin’s gumption, telling he knows that “women can propose too”. Over booze and peaches, Mahin begins to glow. They vow to make wine together, “like lovers do,” take selfies and dance, as the camera rotates around them. There is the sense that there is no more time to waste.

The film’s downbeat final stretch feels especially harsh, then, as Moghaddam and Sanaeeha burst their protagonist’s bubble.

The Iranian government has not supported the film, banning Moghaddam and Sanaeeha from travelling to Berlin for its premiere in February, and accusing the filmmakers of “crossing several red lines”, as Sanaeeha put it to the Hollywood Reporter, by depicting Mahin drinking alcohol and without her hijab.

What’s even more subversive, however, is Mahin’s sense of agency. Moghaddam and Sanaeeha frequently depict her alone at the centre of the frame, whether enjoying an affogato in a posh hotel lobby, waiting for a cab outside the market, or sitting at a park bench overlooking the city. In each setting, Mahin’s independence is presented as a fact rather than pitied.

Too often, later-in-life romances are presented as ‘cute’, neutered, shorn of sexual desire; here that desire is suggested, rather than shown. A scene in which the couple take a shower fully clothed risks reading as twee but in the event is simply tender, as they vulnerably acknowledge their long bouts of celibacy. There’s sensuality to be found elsewhere anyway, in Mahin’s night-blooming jasmine, and the promise of an orange blossom cake.

Simran Hans, Sight and Sound, 11 September 2024.