"The Cakemaker" Review
Food can be cathartic. It can be a symbol of love or a work of art or something that you make and consume purely to survive. Something I love a lot is when food is used in a meaningful way in a story. Enter: "The Cakemaker".
Here's the premise (spoilers for the first 10 minutes of the movie). A German baker, Thomas (Tim Kalkhof) meets an married Israeli man, Oren (Roy Miller). They become lovers until the married man dies. The baker decides to move to Berlin and seek out his lover's widow, Anat (Sarah Adler) and son, Itai (Tamir Ben-Yehuda).
I want to start by saying that I really enjoyed the movie but there were some things that I had problems with from a storytelling standpoint. But before that, I wanted to praise Kalkhof and Adler's performances and their beautiful chemistry. They bond over food and grief and by being with each other on screen, it made things feel like things were going to be okay. It's very sweet and endearing and I loved watching both of them very much.
Another thing I really loved was its symbolic use of food. It looks yummy, sure, but it's more focused on the process of making food and making food with other people which is something I would love to see more of in movies. There's also the conflict between eating for pleasure and eating what you're allowed to eat. i.e., kosher foods -something I found absolutely fascinating.
There are some things I wasn't a fan of. To start with, the movie is about grief and by having a character die so early in the movie, I found it a struggle at times to empathize with what the main characters were going through. The character of Oren is slowly filled in posthumously with a much needed flashback towards the end. Even after all this, I still don't think it was enough to understand this character and to fully empathize with the grief and I think it would've helped to establish a more intimate narrative between Thomas and Oren before tragedy strikes. This way, as an audience member, we feel invested in their relationship without the air of mystery and without enduring the weirdly placed flashback later on. Another thing that I wasn't a fan of was the overly stretched out mystery of will she or won't she find out who Thomas really is. Rather, the film should've stuck with the idea of, when she finds out, what will happen. There were moments where if Adler's character just kept doing what she was doing, she would've easily known the answer and the dramatic tension would then be switched to how her character would deal with this discovery early on.
All this being said, The Cakemaker is still a very emotional movie with two great main characters featuring some great performances and it's worth checking out.