If you want to show solidarity with the women of Iran, you could do worse than spend a couple of hours watching My Favourite Cake. This film annoyed the misogynist regime so much that its directors Maryam Moghadam and Behtash Sanaeeha were prevented from travelling to the Berlin Film Festival where it was first screened in Europe. 

It was so taboo defying that you find yourself wondering how it was even made. The seventy year old woman at the film’s centre de-arrests a young woman from the morality police; she decides that thirty years of living alone is too much and goes out to pick up a man; she finds one, brings him back, plies him with wine and invites him to stay the night. She gifts short shrift to the religiously observant neighbour snooping on her and explains that the busybody feels entitled to spy on people because her husband works for the government. It’s a lovely performance from Lily Farhadpour. 

The taxi driver she picks up in a restaurant where the customers discuss going to an anti-government protest is another seventy year old. Like all the film’s characters he bristles against the poverty and the narrowed horizons the Iranian state offers its citizens and sees “abroad” as somewhere any sensible person would want to be. He had fought in the fratricidal war against Iraq and remarks that while he didn’t get any compensation for his wounds the government did offer him a free grave, an offer he decided not to accept. His gently expressed bitterness against the futility of that slaughter is a direct challenge to the current regime’s ideology. Iranian cities still display portraits of men who died in that war. 

Iranian films that get released in Europe can sometime be bleak. Check out the gallows scene in the excellent Law of Tehran if you want proof of that. By contrast, much of My Favourite Cake is tender and light-hearted. The dinner party in which a group of middle aged women discuss their continence and bowel issues is pretty earthy. The romantic evening the two central characters spend together as they fall in love is romantic without being cloying. 

Without giving too much away, the final scene is both predictable and unexpected. It’s as if the directors thought they could get away with their commentary on the reactionary, misogynistic nature of the Iranian state by melodramatically showing how people who deviate from its absurd notions of morality and female behaviour come to a bad end. Well, they didn’t fool the censors and they didn’t fool me. It is a strong statement in favour of women’s autonomy and for people to be allowed to wear what they want, drink what they want and love whoever they want. 

Keep an eye out for it on a streaming service since its cinema release is likely to be short and limited.