Mark Reviews Movies: THE CAKEMAKER

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 12, 2018

It's one thing to drop everything about one's life just to be near a beloved person. It's another to uproot your life just to be close to the memory of a loved one who has died. The Cakemaker is a story about such an extreme act of mourning, but it's presented with subtlety, restraint, and tenderness. Writer/director Ofir Raul Graizer's debut feature is about acts of grief and deception, as well as how grieving explains the deception while the deception informs the process of grieving.

It's complicated, to say the least, and Graizer allows these characters and this situation to be as complicated as it must be. The film grants its characters the capacity to be uncertain of their own feelings about themselves, each other, and the situation at hand. These are richly detailed characters, and much of that richness comes from what is left unsaid. There are certain things in certain situations, after all, that cannot be spoken or are best left unsaid, if only to spare the feelings of another person. Here, deception is both a way of grieving and a form of kindness, although it inevitably becomes a denial of the truth and an inadvertent act of great harm.

There are contradictions galore here, too, and that gives Graizer's screenplay the ring of authenticity. These are people who barely understand themselves and their own feelings, so it only stands to reason that they'll struggle to understand each other. Part of that is, of course, the string of lies and omissions, but most of it is basic human nature.

The story begins in Berlin, as Oren (Roy Miller), an employee at an Israeli-German company that works in steel, arrives at a café. His work brings him to the city with regularity, away from his family at home in Jerusalem. He and Thomas (Tim Kalkhof), the proprietor of the café, have some brief conversations about the city, about Thomas' baked goods, about Oren's work, and about his family. His son's birthday is approaching, and maybe Thomas, a lifelong native of Berlin and the surrounding area, could show him around to find the right gift. Soon enough, the two men are in Oren's local apartment, and the screen fades to black as they kiss.

A year later, the two men are in the middle of a sporadic love affair, since Oren goes back and forth between Berlin and Jerusalem. Oren is hesitant on the subject of a firmer relationship, since he has no plans to tell his wife about his lover. The question hangs in the air as Oren returns home, and after some time of Oren not returning his calls, Thomas visits the company's local office. Oren died some weeks ago in a car crash in Jerusalem.

The rest of the story takes place in that city, where Oren's widow Anat (Sarah Adler) struggles to keep a newly opened café afloat and to care for her son Itai (Tamir Ben Yehuda). Her brother-in-law Moti (Zohar Shtruss) offers some help, ensuring that the restaurant has the proper government paperwork to decree it kosher and transporting Itai when necessary, but Anat is concerned with Moti's strict religious beliefs.

Thomas arrives at the café one day, pretending to be a student and asking if Anat has any work available. Sometime later, she offers him a job cleaning up and doing errands. He later impresses her with his baking skills. His cookies and cakes, which he is not allowed to cook by law, become a local sensation, and all the while, Anat has no clue that the man who grows so close to her was her late husband's lover.

Graizer provides no explanation for the story's premise or why the relationship between Thomas and Anat unfolds, and that is the correct choice here. How could anyone—most of all, perhaps, Thomas himself—explain such a great upheaval of his life in order to be closer in such an esoteric way to a dead man? Why does Anat avoid the evidence for the truth behind Thomas' sudden appearance in Jerusalem and into her life, even, as we learn late in the film, as it was right in front of her? To consider such questions is to miss the point of the film, which is that such erratic, unthinking behavior is exactly what drives these two characters. They are overcome with grief and secret knowledge. Thomas cannot reveal his relationship with Oren to Anat, because it would be a betrayal to both the dead and the living, and Anat has no reason to reveal what she may or may not have known about her husband's love life in Berlin.

The film lets the relationship between Thomas and Anat grow naturally and, in the logic of two hurt and grieving people, with a sense of inevitability that is both hopeful and somewhat suspenseful. Is there a genuine bond between these two, or is it simply an attempt to recapture the essence of the man they both lost?

The two central performances simultaneously keep such questions a mystery and reveal everything we need to know about these characters. Kalkhof has the difficult task of keeping Thomas sympathetic, despite his lies, but there is such a depth of loneliness, quiet desperation, and empathy in his performance that it's easy enough to comprehend as much as we need to know about his actions. Adler, too, is quite good, especially as Anat puts aside her suspicions about Thomas, because of her feelings toward him, and despite the fact that her character's internal struggles seem to be of slightly less interest to Graizer.

The Cakemaker lives within that fine line of grief, when both things appear hopeless and life seems capable of moving forward. The wisdom of the film is that remains in that place of uncertainty, from Thomas' arrival until its final moments.

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