Reseñas de la crítica

My Favourite Cake is radical and heartwarming. Above all, it’s a reminder that in a world where everyone is scrutinised and judged, pure love remains timeless.

Along with The Seed of the Sacred Fig, My Favourite Cake offers a view of a hidden milieu. The inner life of women in Iran. And like The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Maryam Moghadam and Behtash Sanaeeha’s work is an act of political resistance... My Favourite Cake is an act of hope, desire, and a sumptuous treat. It is also sad, furious, and pushing against a regime that stifles basic humanity. Glorious and heartrending.

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.

Go and see this film: it’s not only a work of art, it’s also a strike for freedom.

Perhaps more radical than the censor-bating, though, is the fact that My Favourite Cake trains its lens on lonely, ordinary older people – a demographic all too frequently invisible to film-makers the world over. A rare delight.

My Favourite Cake is a slice-of-life film with considered dialogue and heartfelt performances that unravels a culturally specific repression, one that got the Iranian filmmakers banned from France and Germany to edit and promote this film, but also the more universal loneliness of the elderly who still have more life to live.

The second film from the directors of Ballad of a White Cow, Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha, is as delicious as the title.

While you feel like the gender politics of the film could have a sharper bite, Farhadpour and Mehrabi are such a cozy pair in Moghaddam and Sanaeeha’s bleak film — whose ending may play as far too cruel to some — it still shines as an aching elegy for what once was good in the world, may never be again.

My Favourite Cake is filled to the brim with hilarious jokes and clever lines that make the film such an unforgettable experience. And Lily Farhadpour and Esmail Mehrabi inhabit their characters with such ease and authenticity that it’s as if we were right there with them, witnessing the magic in real time.

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 film’s gentle humanity is a compelling rebuke to this fatuous, clumsy repression.

The film is exceedingly funny, even in translation, right up to the point where the tone shifts dramatically. Deeply endearing on every level, from its anti-authoritarian politics to its body positivity to general joie de vivre, this is a crowdpleaser through and through.

What it lacks in edge, the film certainly makes up for in the quality of its performances and watching Farhadpour and Mehrabi mutually glow off each other is a pleasure...