My Favourite Cake (12A) |Close-Up Film Review

What a lovely little film! With her husband dead some 30 years, and now aged 70, Mahin (Lili Farhadpour) misses her old life. The local friends she used to see regularly, no longer live nearby and they only get together once a year.

Although her friends speak to her on the phone, the conversations consist of discussion on bodily functions and ailments.

Her daughter and family have emigrated. Mahin lives quietly alone just outside Tehran in the repressive climate that is modern day Iran 

Mahin decides to start living the sort of life she wants and sets out to find a gentleman companion. She decides to get close to taxi driver Faramaz (Esmaeel Mehrabi), who also lives, not very contentedly, by himself. He’s 70, too, and they become close after she invites him back to her home and they drink many glasses of wine and share food which she delights in preparing. 

The rest of the story and ending are not really what we expect. The film is beautifully made and we laugh and then are moved emotionally as the story plays out. 

The two leads are fantastic and the setting in a restrictive Iran is very well depicted – in fact the directors had their passports confiscated and were not allowed to travel abroad to promote the film. 

Not many films are as well directed, acted and written as this one. Unmissable.