Etamad Cinema, Mashreq wrote: The movie “My Favorite Cake” produced by last year, has been published in unofficial channels these days and has become a critical tool, most of these criticisms are metatextual and political, and usually the content of the work is not evaluated from a non-political angle.
If the content of the work is evaluated, metatextual judgments will be easier. The most important result of the analysis of the work is that the audience will find out whether they are facing professional creators or watching an amateur experimental work. Can a film that only captures its internal shots without the conventional hijab be classified as deconstructive works?
Activation of the sympathetic hypothalamus, escape from the Isle of Langerhans
The latest joint work of Maryam Moghadam and Behtash Sana’i is about the situation of a lonely elderly woman named Mehin (Lili Farhadpour). This conservatism is clearly evident in the objective behavior of this character. One of her manifestations is that she locks the doors of the house, and the data of the film shows that this 70-year-old woman, 30 years after her husband’s death, has not had a relationship with any man, and suddenly after thirty years, she comes out of the cocoon of conservatism and ends up in an army restaurant with a Meets a retired army man.
After this simple one-sided acquaintance, Mahin decides to invite him to his house as a companion. In fact, on the morning before this decision, this old woman, who lived alone from the age of forty to seventy, suddenly activated her sympathetic hypothalamus and planned to end her solitude on Langerhans Islands.
Fighting and fighting!?
One of the most important fundamental problems of the film is that the next events of the narrative at the beginning of the film are completely predictable. The female period is performed at the very beginning of the film in the style of Ramadan series, and the topic of loneliness of old women is brought up and thus the audience reads the hand of the filmmaker. After this completely televised sequence, Mahin is determined to spread his net the next day, before dark, to relieve his loneliness. He makes his way to the park to find where the old men exercise in the park, but the search in the park is futile and he finds his companion in a depressing environment.
In this film, a weakness of characterization is obvious. A conservative woman suddenly becomes brave in the field of hunting men. Two sequences of the film prove that this film, regardless of the textual margins by surveillance devices and agents, is at the level of instructive television series. The two sequences of the military party in the restaurant and the first one of us in Mahin’s house (women’s party) show what the Berlin festival has become. Even the video dialogue sequence between Mahin and the girl is completely performed and televised and seasoned with style.
How to conquer world festivals with TV series?
If the two directors of the film watch the sequence of the guided tour of the Marmoz Tabrizi movie, they will definitely apologize to the girls who were attracted by the guided tour in a statement.With this account, any of the Pandamussima series, which has long female and male period sequences, if recreated by artificial intelligence minus the hijab, can appear in the Berlin Film Festival and will have a higher quality than the movie “My Favorite Cake”. Even the final tragedy of the film is more similar to the series “Ta Soraya” directed by Siros Moghadam than the critics claim.
“My Beloved Cake” has the story material of a short film, and by adding the unnecessary sequence of Irshad’s encounter with Mahin’s character, he wants to turn this conservative old woman into a protesting character, which despite the efforts of the creators, this idea fails.
While one of the best cinematographic scenes facing the Irshad patrol is the same sequence that Kamal Tabrizi portrayed in the movie Marmoz. In the mysterious movie, Zahir Dibasolati (Vishka Asaish) has signs to attract the Irshad patrol officers, and Qadratullah Samadi (Hamid Behdad) enters the battle to prevent Soolati from being taken into the van by the patrol officers. But the interesting thing is that in the movie “My Favorite Cake”, the girls who are going to be attracted by the patrol, their hijab is similar to the standard of TV presenters.
This same sequence shows that if the producers intend to play the role of “dissident cinematographer” in the style of Panahi, Rasulof, they must have learned a minimum of deconstruction. If the two directors of the film watch the sequence of the guided tour of the Marmoz Tabrizi movie, they will definitely apologize to the girls who were attracted by the guided tour in a statement.
One of the many problems of the film is that it reveals the story too soon. The creators were so fascinated by the idea of Laili Farhadpour not having a hijab and showing the actors drinking wine that they forgot not to reveal some events of the film quickly. When Farmarez says I need to buy pills while going to Mahin’s house, any viewer with below average knowledge will be sure that he will buy Viagra and when they get home and the male character drinks a few glasses of wine with Doleme seasoning.
Any 70-year-old person with a physical condition suitable for eating dolmeh and wine minus Viagra will definitely leave the country, if Faramorz survives eating wine, Viagra and a heavy dolmeh, he will definitely go away in the rest of the movie by eating a cake filled with cream prepared by Mahin. Diyar would remain.
In fact, what is surprising is that usually seventy-year-old people at least observe the policy of food abstinence and will not continue to eat wine, dalme and Viagra tablets at the same time. This level of simple awareness is unreal in the age of internet access. Narrative engineering means Viagra, drinking too much wine, eating curds, doing long frozen movements and taking cold showers.
Why was my favorite cake maker not recognized?
Recently, two film directors have indicated that their case has been accused of “spreading corruption”, while the Ministry of Health could have commended the film makers for conveying global medical messages.The apparently independent film directors are no different from the Ramadan serial makers in conveying the message, trying to convey simple and practical moral messages to the audience. Here Sana’i and Moghadam try to present a health message to the audience over seventy years old that love of the moment plus the combination of traditional wine and industrial Viagra will lead to death.
Recently, two film directors have mentioned that their case has been accused of “spreading corruption”, while the Ministry of Health could have commended the film makers for conveying global medical messages!
One of the thick political messages of the film is related to the part where the audience becomes aware of the anatomy of the retired population and one of the old men in the restaurant makes a prismatic reference to his body. This reference is the most political, the most strategic, the anti-government discourse that probably excited the audience present at the Berlin festival to encourage the creators for a few minutes.
The processing of the characters has damaged this work from various aspects. The ultra-conservative Mahin suffers from a behavioral paradox and at the age of 70, on the first date, he convinces a man to bring him to his house, and this fear is so great that he advises him to park his car in the nearby alley.
Now, in the last half, this conservative woman decides to bury the man’s body in her house. Even Marvel’s superhero characters such as Wonder Woman, Miss Marvel, Squirrel Girl, Ororo Monroe, Elektra Natchios, etc., do not undergo sudden changes in this way. Even the woman does not think about the fact that one day colleagues, distant or near relatives will decide to find the border or the police will find her car with public reports.
An old woman who is at her most conservative in her seventies has reached a level of individual courage that reduces the film to provincial telefilms.
He brought a laborer to his house to dig a pit the size of a grave for him with the promise that he is going to plant trees in this pit. Is such a pit needed to plant a tree, and the digging worker never doubts this issue, there is no need to dig a grave to plant a tree in this small yard.
How did Mahin find the physical strength to bury a man in his yard? In one of the dialogues, he tells one of his friends that he can’t walk up four flights of stairs, but in the park sequences, we see him walking up countless stairs, and the wonder of Wonder Woman’s act during the burial of Jess Farmars stands out.
Mahin has a neighbor who knocks on her door when she hears the slightest noise, but during the dance ceremony and laughing loudly, the old woman representing the religious class does not show any curiosity.
The female character of the film has made countless purchases for her friends’ party and carries the purchases with a wheelbarrow and sits in the car waiting for a car to take her home. However, although he can video call his daughter, he cannot use Snap. Even if he does not know how to specify the origin and destination using the Internet application, it is enough to call Snap or Tapsi number.
But the important thing is that we see Faramarz in an agency that has many clients. While the agency has completely lost its position in the urban geography of Tehran, and despite the startup Tapsi and Snap, we don’t know of an agency that is so prolific.
This woman’s behavior is very strange for a man who enters her home for the first time, even in a situation where she allows him to use her bathroom. These situations make the character unrealistic.
Behtash Sana’iha is more prominent than his goals about a human situation with the political messages of Khalezanki, his engineered health messages are prominent in this film.