arts&life

film

Tim Kalkhof in The Cakemaker.

PHOTO COURTESY OF STRAND RELEASING.

The Israeli-German

fi lm The Cakemaker

— an indie festival

favorite — has it all.

TOM TUGEND
JEWISH JOURNAL OF GREATER L.A.

details

The Cakemaker is currently
playing at the Maple Theater in
Bloomfield Township. It will open
at Ann Arbor’s Michigan Theatre
on Aug. 17.

Religion, Sex
and
Pastries
T

he Cakemaker should
satisfy the most finicky
pastry lover, but the
Israeli-German co-production
has also elicited both ecstatic
praise and sneering dismissal
from film critics.
Variety gushes over the
“tender, tactile” atmosphere of
the “auspicious feature debut,”
while the Hollywood Reporter
dismisses the “wishy-washy
characters … weak screenplay
… and stiff performance” of the
lead character.
Audiences are likely to be
divided along the same lines,
depending to a large extent on
their tolerance for sexually and
emotionally complex charac-
ters that don’t fall easily into
standard categories.
Despite this, The Cakemaker
has been one of the more suc-
cessful indie films on the inter-
national festival circuit over the
past year.
Thomas (German actor Tim
Kalkhof) runs a small cake and

pastry café in Berlin. Among his
most loyal customers is Israeli
businessman Oren, who works
for an Israeli-German city plan-
ning company. Oren is played
by Israeli actor Roy Miller.
Although devoted to his wife,
Anat, and young son back in
Jerusalem, Oren finds himself
sexually attracted to Thomas,
and the two begin an affair.
When Oren has to return to
Jerusalem, he promises to stay
in touch and return to Berlin a
month later.
No spoilers; it’s all revealed
in the trailer: When Thomas
doesn’t hear from Oren, he
keeps calling him but there
is no response. Eventually he
checks in with Oren’s office and
discovers Oren was killed in an
auto accident.
Distraught, but determined
to learn more about his dead
lover, Thomas flies to Israel
and tracks down the restaurant
run by Anat (played by talented
Israeli actress Sarah Adler.)

Without revealing his rela-
tionship with Oren, Thomas is
hired as a dishwasher. However,
he can’t resist baking some
cookies on the side, which
delight Anat and her son. Less
delighted is Anat’s observant
brother Moti (Zohar Strauss)
because the German unwitting-
ly has used treif ingredients,
thus putting at risk the restau-
rant’s kosher certification.
Nevertheless, Thomas
now moves into full cake-
baking mode, and the hitherto
sparsely patronized restaurant
becomes a highly popular local
eatery.
Anat soon falls in love with
Thomas and makes the initial
sexual overtures. After some
hesitation, Thomas recipro-
cates.
The Cakemaker looks at the
complexities created when
people of different and chang-
ing sexual orientations, reli-
gions and nationalities try to
establish close relationships.

jn

Orchestrating the complex
interactions in his first feature
film is Ofir Raul Graizer, born
in Israel but working out of
Berlin. The film’s dialogue,
written also by Graizer, is
in Hebrew, German, and —
when Israelis converse with
Germans — English.
Graizer is openly gay but
argues in both his profes-
sional and personal life against
defining a person by a single
facet. Raised by a religious
father and a secular mother,
Graizer explained his perspec-
tive in an interview with the
online site Cineuropa.
“I always wanted to tell a
story about people who don’t
want to be defined by political,
sexual or national identities,”
he said. “They want to say, ‘I
don’t care about this identity;
I am who I am. I want to love
someone because I need to be
close to that person and not
because I’m homosexual or
heterosexual.’” •

August 9 • 2018

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