With the big-screen release of My Favourite Cake, Liam Maguren points out what this film shares with some other classics in the romance genre.
My Favourite Cake
A lot of people like to scoff at the central idea of Romeo & Juliet. Can two teenagers really fall so madly in love in just a few days to where they’re willing to take their own lives if the other one dies? Probably not, but that didn’t stop William Shakespeare from making that classic tragedy feel believable.
Perhaps it speaks to the modern commitment-phobic generation that quick and fleeting romances are so often seen as hoaky. To that end, it’s no wonder Millennials and Gen Z feverously felt the third degree yearns of early 2024 Netflix hit One Day. Starring Leo Woodall and Ambika Mod, this will-they-won’t-they limited series jumped a year in time per episode (14 in total) to illustrate a love story stretched across eras—and it struck a chord.
But such longitudinal yearning is a privileged offered to youth and no-one should be caught in the trap of thinking love can only be slow boiled over eons. One of this year’s nominees for the Golden Berlin Bear argues the opposite can be true: that deep love can ignite fast and blindingly bright for those who seek it, and it takes a pair of 70-year-old lovebirds to show us how.
My Favourite Cake centres on Mahin (Lili Farhadpour), a longtime widow living independently in a rather nice house. She sleeps till noon, tends to her garden, has a smoko, does her shopping, video chats with family, watches her stories, and goes to bed. By all accounts, she has a pretty good life.
However, with her kids no longer living in Iran, and her circle of friends unable to gather as often as they used to, loneliness has crept in—a quiet sadness all-too-common for those of a certain vintage.
Fortunately, being a woman of the Iranian revolution, the strong-willed Mahin knows the value of getting out in the world and following her heart. Through a series of strategic manoeuvres, she courts Faramarz (Esmaeel Mehrabi)—an elderly taxi driver who cannot believe his luck—back to her home, where most of the film takes place.
This one fateful evening is smothered with tenderness, a lot of it melting from Farhadpour and Mehrabi’s snuggly warm performances. Filmmakers Maryam Moghadam and Behtash Sanaeeha direct this film with quiet precision, allowing the small moments to fill out the spaces in this blossoming bond between two lonely hearts.
Early on, we see Mahin applying makeup for no-one—a sombre reminiscence of her youth. When Faramarz comes over, she eagerly dolls herself up. Faramarz’s eyes light up. Mahin tucks her head sheepishly. They’re two of many beautiful instances of slack-jawed sweetness that are difficult to put into words.
Faramarz, however, has the perfect words when he toasts “to the best night of my life.” It may not sound much out of context, but it hits different from a man who admits to feeling like loneliness was his predetermined fate. After seeing this pair swap stories, listen to music, discuss the state of Iran, eat some fruit, and get a little wine-drunk, that simple little line carries momentous power.
That line, as simple as it is, continued to reverberate in my head during the film’s final act and long after the credits rolled. Part of it was due to how, within the span of 30 minutes, My Favourite Cake completely convinced me of this rapid-fire romance through little more than performances, dialogue, and filmmakers who knew how to give both those qualities space to flourish.
Before Sunrise
Richard Linklater conjures that same magic with young stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in 1995’s Before Sunrise. Twentysomething strangers Jesse, the cocky-but-sweet American, and Céline, the cute-n-wry French girl, follow a similar impulse to Marin and Faramarz by exiting their train and spending a night in Vienna together. Fuelled heavily by the performances and the script, Jesse and Céline’s getting-to-know-you conversations plunges them deep into romance, and it’s impossible not to sink into the film’s spell.
Turning the clock much further back to 1945, filmmaker David Lean’s Brief Encounter has stood the test of time with its forward-thinking, non-judgemental story about a short, secret affair. Celia Johnson superbly traverses the planes of starry-eyed and sorrow laden as Laura, a married woman who becomes romantically involved with the handsome—and also married—Dr. Harvey (Trevor Howard). As the title suggests, a simple act of kindness (the good doctor removing a piece of grit from Laura’s eye) is all it takes to kick off an entanglement that inflates the pair’s hearts with love while simultaneously twists them with guilt.
Brief Encounter
A beautifully bittersweet portrait of human longing, Brief Encounter might be cinema’s first documented case of third degree yearns. And yearning is most definitely what drives Marin and Faramarz in My Favourite Cake. Not initially a yearning for each other, but a yearning to share their life with someone else, which quickly folds into a yearning for one another.
We’ll get that same quick-fire romance later this year with the far more energetic Anora, filmmaker Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or-winning fairytale about a sex worker and the son of a Russian oligarch who fall madly in love and get hitched in Vegas within the span of Romeo & Juliet’s entire relationship. In the meantime, for a softer but no-less potent film about sudden romance, you can’t look past My Favourite Cake.
