Review: The President’s Cake — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

The President’s Cake

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Rating: PG-13

Run Time: 1 hour 45 minutes

Star: Baneen Ahmad Nayyef

Writer/Director: Hasan Hadi

Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival

Once again, a director from the Middle East proves the adage that you need to suffer to make great art.

Devastating and profoundly human, The President’s Cake follows Lamia, an impoverished young girl — played with wide-eyed intensity by Baneen Ahmad Nayyef, an actress of uncommonly natural instinct — as she tries to assemble the ingredients necessary to bake a birthday cake for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

It is early 1990s Iraq, and the president’s birthday is a national holiday. Every person in every city and village is required to celebrate, and that includes the designation of one unlucky individual in each locality as the provider of that year’s presidential birthday cake. Lamia is the unfortunate “winner” of the cake baker lottery in her community of Iraqis who live in a floating Euphrates marsh settlement.

For Lamia, the task is practically impossible: Flour, sugar, and yeast are all but impossible to find in an Iraq that is buckling under U.S. sanctions and a brutally corrupt government. Still, Lamia’s grade school teacher, a boorish and cruel soldier, warns if she doesn’t come through, she and her grandmother — the girl’s sole caretaker — will be dragged through the streets.

Lamia heads for the nearest large town in search of the precious ingredients with no money; only her faith that someone — anyone — will be willing to help her. The girl’s quest plays out against a background of omnipresent militaristic nationalism — the leader’s image is everywhere; all citizens are compelled to pledge (loudly) their undying allegiance to and borderline worship of the very man who is right now responsible for every hardship in their lives. Masked enforcers roam the streets, patriotic music fills the air, threats of retaliation hover above every overheard conversation.

In the bustling streets, Lamia — accompanied by a street urchin friend and carrying her beloved pet rooster in a sling — weaves among the various classes of Iraqi society, from untouchable beggars to haggling merchants to the moneyed, favored Persian class, seen here sipping coffee and serenading each other in carpeted hangouts. Victimized by one self-serving adult after another, Lamia keeps lowering her head and plunging forward, selling items and trading favors to get what she needs.

The story’s two main locales — the Mesopotamian marshlands that were the childhood home of director Hasan Hadi and the streets of a midsized city — are filmed with a combination of reverent nostalgia and dirt-under-the-fingernails authenticity. The actors — particularly Lamia’s grandmother and the various shop keepers the girl encounters — are mostly non-professionals, as authentic as figures from a National Geographic documentary.

The rooster, by the way, manages to steal each scene in which it plays a part, and those are numerous. Happily, the actors are totally comfortable adlibbing with the creature, infusing much-needed comic relief to a story of ironically hopeful desperation.

The President’s Cake has been egregiously ignored this awards season. Norway’s Sentimental Value and Brazil’s The Secret Agent, certainly worthy films, nevertheless clog up four Oscar nomination slots as they vie for both Best Picture and Best International Film. The Oscars should make up their minds and automatically remove any international films from the latter category when they qualify for the top spots.

In the tradition of Iran’s Asghar Farhadi (2011’s A Separation) and Jafar Panahi (this year’s Oscar nominee It Was Just an Accident) — filmmakers who make movies as if their lives depend on it — Iraqi writer/director Hasan Hadi sends from the Middle East a quiet contemplation of life under emotional and economic siege; and a reminder that in the end, human dignity will always assert itself, no matter what.