My Favourite Cake review - woman, love, and freedom

The taxi cab has become a recurring motif in modern Iranian cinema, perhaps because it approximates to a kind of dissident bubble within the authoritarian state, a public space where individuals can have private and often subversive conversations.

In his 2015 docufiction Taxi Tehran, the outlawed director Jafar Panahi pretended to be a cab driver, taking inspiration from the late great Abbas Kiarostami’s 10 (2002), in which Mania Akbari, who may have actually been the film’s true begetter, seems to be a taxi driver even if she’s not.

Both movies focussed on the atomised lives of Iranians under siege by the regime. The tyranny of religious law, or the abuse of religion by law, is also the subject of My Favourite Cake, the latest film – their third – by wife-and-husband directing duo, Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha. Moghaddam herself also acted in Panahi’s 2013 paranoid hallucinatory thriller Closed Curtain (co-directed with Kambuzia Partovi), and in the duo’s second feature, Ballad of a White Cow (2020), which provoked the wrath of Iran’s strict Islamic government.

The new film is set against the more recent backdrop, i.e., post-September 2022, of the Women, Life, Freedom protest movement in Iran. Yet its themes are universal: age, love and the social invisibility of older people, especially that of women. The 70-year-old heroine, Mahin (a luminous performance from Lili Farhadpour, who had a supporting role in Ballad of a White Cow), rescues a teenage girl (Melika Pazouki) from the clutches of the Morality Police, emboldened perhaps by her own wistful memory of a pre-revolutionary time when hijabs were not mandatory for women. “You have to strand up for yourself,” she tells the girl, who is hurrying off to meet her boyfriend. “The more submissive you are, the more they’ll push you down.” (Pictured below: Melika Pazouki and Lili Farhadpour)

In fact, the story begins with Mahin’s sudden realisation, waking up alone, that she has submitted for too long to a destiny of old age, loneliness, and widowhood, and so she goes looking for a man – here comes the recurring motif – at a taxi stand.

The cab driver she meets is Faramarz, a modest but charming military veteran of her own age, played with astonishing subtlety and verve by Esmaeel Mehrabi as another victim of ageism and state repression. “I’ve become an old man,” he says after driving her home, sitting furtively in her kitchen where she bakes him her favourite cake, orange blossom with vanilla cream. “I don’t know when it started but no one sees me any more.” (A nosy neighbour who briefly interrupts this late-blooming romance indicates the sort of banal piety that empowers the Iranian regime’s religious hypocrisy.)

This deceptively subdued film is often a meditation on loneliness. The cinematographer Mohammad Haddadi deftly captures the sense of loss, of muted existence, in a series of beautifully composed tableaux of Mahin’s rust-coloured furniture seemingly trapped – as she is – in the decade that interior decor forgot. And yet, in spite of multiplying premonitions of death, the overarching mood of the film is joyous and life-affirming, and even hilarious.

Two scenes in particular had me literally falling out of my seat. In the first, the two septuagenarian sweethearts guzzle wine and cavort around the sitting-room to the sound of a pre-revolutionary Iranian pop song. (“You’re so cute when you dance,” says Mahin, to which Faramarz replies, “You’re the cute one!") Later he asks her to take a shower with him but she’s too ashamed of her body: “I haven’t been naked in front of anyone for 30 years,” she confesses. “Don’t worry,” he says. “I haven’t seen anyone naked for longer than that.” Cut to the two of them sitting side by side – and fully clothed – under the shower.

Life imitating art etc., Iran’s theocratic dictatorship apparently took issue with these scenes of hijab-free boozing and dancing and self-expression, with the result that last summer the security forces raided the home of Ata Mehrad, Moghaddam and Sanaeeha’s editor, seizing copies of the film. In February, the duo were prevented from travelling to the Berlin Film Festival for the world premiere, and were later charged with making anti-government propaganda.

In a statement read out to the festival in their absence, the co-directors refuted this charge, but then added that their only desire had been to make a film “in praise of women, life, and freedom”, craftily echoing the slogan of the protest movement that started two years ago after the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a young Iranian woman who was arrested by the Morality Police for not wearing the hijab correctly. Go and see this film: it’s not only a work of art, it’s also a strike for freedom.

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