Clicky

THE CAKEMAKER – Review – We Are Movie Geeks

Review

THE CAKEMAKER – Review

By  | 

Tim Kalkhof as Thomas in director Ophir Raul Graizer’s THE CAKEMAKER. Photo courtesy of Strand Releasing.

Israeli writer/director Ophir Raul Graizer crafts a brilliant, moving drama that touches on identity, secrets, loneliness, sexuality and grief, in the Israeli-German drama THE CAKEMAKER. The drama is in English, German and Hebrew, with English subtitles.

Israeli businessman Oren (Roy Miller) is a man living a double life., traveling monthly between Israel and Germany for his work as a city planner for an Israeli-German company. He has a wife Anat (Sarah Adler) and young son in Jerusalem and a gay lover Thomas (Tim Kalkhof), a gifted young baker, in Berlin. The quiet German baker knows from the start that Oren is married, and accepts their secret status, but Oren’s wife Anat (Sarah Adler) does not know, and according to Oren, never will. For a year, Oren visits Thomas every month or so, always taking back a box of Thomas’ cinnamon cookies for his wife. One time, Oren leaves Berlin, forgetting his keys, but he never returns or even returns Thomas’ phone messages. Eventually, Thomas learns that Oren was killed in an accident in Jerusalem.

The next time we see Thomas, he is standing on a Jerusalem street, watching Oren’s widow Anat as she shops in a large open-air market. Still mourning her husband, Anat has just re-opened her kosher cafe. Thomas comes in, but says nothing about knowing Oren or who he is. Instead, he asks her for a job, and she eventually hires him as a dishwasher, unaware of his baking skills.

THE CAKEMAKER is so good, it is hard to believe it is Graizer’s directorial debut, yet it is. The story is basically a love triangle with the third person being the lost Oren, in which both Anat and Thomas try to hold on to their lost love.

The basic structure is melodrama and there are obvious ways this story could go, but Graizer takes none of those paths. The film is restrained, delicate and nuanced, with a striking feeling of reality. The unlikely bond that grows between Anat and Thomas revolves around Oren, like both each is using the other as a substitute for him. But it is not that simple nor that obvious, and Graizer has plenty of other things to say.

There are no villains or heroes in this story, all is shades of gray and nuance. The acting is excellent, particularly by Sarah Adler as the weary, struggling widow and Tim Kalkhof as the restrained baker, who only seems truly comfortable when he is baking. The whole film is shot in a lovely, lyrical style by cinematographer Omri Aloni, which is further enhanced by an elegant, graceful piano-based score by Dominique Charpentier.

Anat’s cafe is kosher, and the presence of a non-Jewish person in the kitchen creates some problems with the kosher certification of the cafe, newly awarded by the inspector Avram (Eliezer Lipa Shimon). Anat’s brother-in-law Moti (Zohar Strauss) is also upset to find someone non-Jewish in the cafe, and a German no less. Moti complains about him being an immigrant but clearly that he is German is especially distasteful.

Director Graizer uses Thomas’ shy demeanor to make him a bit of an enigma. His motives are opaque but his baking helps make Anat’s cafe a success. The director uses the baker’s German identity and his presence as a outsider to comment on Israeli society. Thomas does not speak Hebrew and communicates in English, while the Israelis around him switch back and forth between Hebrew and English, depending on whether they want him to hear. However, Anat is unfailingly kind to him, perhaps given her husband’s work in Germany, and even invites the lonely outsider to Shabbat dinner.

Thomas arrives for dinner at Anat’s with a Black Forest cake, one of Oren’s favorites. It had been raining, and Anat gives him some dry clothes – Oren’s. At dinner, Oren’s son Itai (Tomer Ben Yehuda) puts a yarmulke on Thomas’ head, and the German listens attentively as Itai says the prayer. When it comes time for dessert, the Black Forest cake, Itai volunteers that his uncle Moti told him not to eat any of Thomas’s food. Anat gentle chides her son, and helps herself to some of the delicious cake. Later that night, Anat devours another slice of cake with relish.

The film is sprinkled with delicately moving scenes. Back in his apartment, Thomas lays out Oren’s clothes on his bed, and then puts the yarmulke back on as he looks at them, in a haunting scene. In another scene, Thomas uses the keys Oren forget last time he was in Berlin to open a locker in a swim club. Thomas takes a swim in Oren’s swim suit, an act of intimacy, and then takes home the trunks and towel.

Something else Thomas finds in the locker suggests that he was not Oren’s first gay lover. Anat seems unaware of her husband’s sexual preference but there are hints that Oren’s mother Hanna (Sandra Sadeh) knows. Hanna is remarkably kind towards Thomas, even offering to show him Oren’s old bedroom. Even Moti seems to come around to accepting the gentle, passive baker, bringing him some food his mother fixed and inviting him to his apartment for the next Shabbat, so he isn’t alone.

Food and love have been linked in films before, and THE CAKEMAKER has several lush scenes of baking that convey that link. There is a lot of about food and love in this film. That both Thomas and Anat runs cafes is significant, as well as their complementary skills as cook and baker. Oren was a person who loved to eat, as Anat tells us, but didn’t cook. Both wife and lover filled that need for him.

The director skillfully guides us through a complex maze of issues and feelings. Thomas’ shy gentleness and hidden pain means he tugs at our hearts but who he is, where he is, and what he is doing unsettles us. Graizer shows a deft hand as he navigates the fraught issue of this German in Israel, raising issues of the growing economic ties between the two contemporary countries, as unspoken memories of the Holocaust haunt us. As a German immigrant in Israel, Thomas encounters mixed reactions, but the fact that Thomas is hiding his true nature and his relationship with Oren makes the audience uneasy on top of the uneasiness created by that.

THE CAKEMAKER, in English, German and Hebrew, with English subtitles, opens Friday, August 17, at the Plaza Frontenac Cinema.

RATING: 4 1/2 out of 5 stars