For some time now, My Favorite Cake, directed by Maryam Moghadam and Behtash Sanaeeha, has been available to the public through some Telegram channels. After receiving attention in the 74th Berlin Film Festival’s cinema circles, audiences now have easy access to this film.
My Favorite Cake draws power from its strong screenplay, memorable performances by Leili Farhadpour and Esmail Mehrabi, and the courage to articulate life’s most essential desires. Most of its scenes take place indoors with a limited cast, yet it keeps viewers engrossed from start to finish and leaves them in thought. The film’s major shortcoming lies in its ending.
My Favorite Cake tells the story of a woman named Mahin, who lost her husband long ago and whose children have emigrated. Now, at seventy, she decides to meet a man and spend an evening with him. This film revolves around the body of an elderly woman. Our identities are tied to our memories. She reflects on the beauties of her childhood, adolescence, and youth, which help her cope with the constraints of old age. Similarly, old and long-forgotten traumas resurface amid recent losses. It’s no wonder that some say we recall childhood and youth memories at the moment of death. Old stories, like these, are always personal. The elderly body is a reservoir of stories and memories, and when it dances, a lifetime moves with it. This is the essence My Favorite Cake seeks to convey.
Moghadam mentioned in an interview that she began conceptualizing My Favorite Cake three years before the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement. Even so, the film, made without a license in Iran and refusing censorship, resonates with the spirit of the movement, reflecting the characters’ yearning for freedom.
In the film, Mahin holds full agency and isn’t deprived of civil courage either. In one scene, she confronts morality police in a park. She’s the one who invites a retired military driver, a man of her age, to spend an evening enjoying food and drink with her. She manages her life as she pleases, cooks delicious food, bakes cakes, drinks wine, and invites the man she’s chosen to dance. Mahin, in a way, is a woman of the heart. The dance scene in her room is unforgettable, echoing the youthful dances of girls and boys on Iranian streets during the Jina uprising. In this film, joy and festivity overlap with the protestors’ demands throughout Iran, and Mahin’s agency mirrors that of the Iranian woman.
Death Contemplation: The Trap of the Islamic Republic
Though Moghadam and Sanaeeha grasped the movement’s spirit long before Women, Life, Freedom, they end up contemplating death, ultimately falling into the trap the Islamic Republic lays before us.
The film’s final scenes—Mahin’s despair, her time spent with the corpse of the man she intended to enjoy an evening with, and her burying him in the garden—do not resonate with life’s realities, nor align with the Women, Life, Freedom movement’s spirit. Mahin is full of vitality, kindness, and profound empathy, yet she ends up in death’s company.
Cormac McCarthy, the late American author, said that art’s supreme subject always connects to death. Were Sanaeeha and Moghadam driven by this understanding of art, or did they sense the repressive atmosphere before it hit us? Let’s not forget that the Women, Life, Freedom movement is rooted in the nationwide protests of December 2017.
Political science researcher Tariq Siddiq, in The New Culture of Protest, explores 21st-century protest movements worldwide, including Women, Life, Freedom and movements in Hong Kong and Sudan, analyzing factors influencing these movements’ success or failure. Siddiq predicts that if civil disobedience persists in Iran, a broader movement could emerge within five years. This began in December 2017, making it possible that the filmmakers foresaw repression and death as the response to our need for life, joy, and togetherness—a foresight that shaped the film’s ending. However, the film’s instructive aspect outweighs its artistic one. In an era filled with war, killing, genocide, oppression, and plunder, people are lonelier and more vulnerable than ever, in desperate need of hope. For someone sixty, lonely, repressed, and whose dreams the regime has shattered, hope is a lifeline. Handing her a corpse is hardly sensitive, even with a social purpose.
My Favorite Cake isn’t so much an auteur film with symbolic messages; it’s a TV film for the masses with an instructive side. The symbolic ending feels imposed—not a natural result of the storyline but inserted to elevate a TV film to auteur cinema. It’s a serious flaw.
Deep Connection to the Characters
Volker Faust, a neurologist and founder of a social psychology working group, writes that memories gain emotional weight with age: “Remembering past events becomes more significant in old age. The images that come to mind are closely linked to emotions. Often, others cannot bear to hear ‘old stories.’ But let older people talk, listen actively, ask questions.”
Iran not only ages with each passing day, but younger people also lean on the memories of those who lived in the pre-Islamic Republic era. Those dissatisfied with the present and anxious about the future seek refuge in the past. Think of Iran’s best-known pop singers and the global concerts they perform. To outsiders, it might seem like they’re attending a nursing home’s concert. We’ve made the distant past into a golden era to endure the misery of the present.
However, My Favorite Cake breaks from this nostalgia. Mahin and Faramarz’s night of joy is what matters, not the past or the future. Their stories of the past are just introductions, and they know the future might not even be there. At seventy, they know it’s enough to reach eighty safely. This makes their carefree approach perfectly logical and reflects Sanaeeha and Moghadam’s deep connection with their characters.
A New Lease on Life
We meet Mahin when she invites friends over for lunch, discussing how to meet men. One friend shares her story of sitting in the front seat of a car, talking to the driver, and eventually bonding over a hearty halim breakfast. We learn Mahin once turned down a man’s advances, perhaps not ready to love again after her husband’s death. During the conversation, they mention the need to change an elderly guest’s diaper—a reminder of their age and that time isn’t on their side. Mahin’s phone call with her daughter reveals she has beautiful clothes she’s never had a chance to wear. All of this points to an unlived life, with little time left to experience it. So, she gathers her courage and takes a step forward.
Mahin’s actions are the opposite of death contemplation. She prepares herself gracefully, paints her nails, and recalls her body’s need for affection. Where the story should pivot around lost chances and unlived life, creating a memorable romance, it veers toward death contemplation, perhaps due to the directors’ preoccupation with death in literature and art, or the weight of a repressive environment.
Political prisoners of the 1980s recount that those unyielding in their beliefs were forced into coffins in Evin Prison to make them “see the light.” The Islamic Republic wants us to forget our dreams, our past, and embrace their version of life. Mahin, like a hero, resists, but a mix of a retired army man’s exhaustion from daily survival, nosy neighbors, improper medication, sleepless nights, and excessive drinking ends up dragging the story to a dead end.
The film’s highlight is reintroducing the genuine character of an Iranian woman and man, brushing away the distorted portrayals imposed on us for forty years by TV and film. Mahin isn’t the woman the Islamic Republic wants to show; she’s the everyday Iranian woman—our mother, sister, wife, or relative. Yet, My Favorite Cake could’ve been an impactful telefilm with an instructive side. Instead, it turned into a protest film with a symbolic, imposed ending. Even here, the Islamic Republic’s influence lingers. You escape one part of it, and it shows up somewhere else.
Because of this film, Sanaeeha and Moghadam are banned from leaving the country. Farhadpour and Esmail Mehrabi’s remarkable, natural performances will be remembered, as will Mahin’s character—a fighter in Iranian cinema’s memory. An unforgettable film with a symbolic, yet imposed, ending.
What you think?