‘The Cakemaker’ review — Israel’s Oscar entry is a sweet drama

The Cakemaker, Israel’s 2019 Oscar entry, is a quiet and sweet drama with a great lead performance by Tim Kalkhof.

The Cakemaker is about a relationship, but not a romantic one as the setup suggests. Instead, it’s a quiet and sensitively told story about grief and how different people process it. However, there’s so much more to it. The story covers everything from the complexity of faith and religion to the struggle with identity in relation to sexuality. However, it doesn’t throw those themes in your face. It doesn’t say as much as it shows.

Thomas (Tim Kalkhof) is a German pastry chef living in Berlin. In the opening minutes of the film, a handsome new customer arrives. He learns his name is Oren (Roy Miller) and that he is on a business trip from Israel and that his new project for his company will bring him to the city once a month. The film doesn’t waste any time before showing the two beginning a relationship that goes as far as setting up a home for the couple when Oren visits. The complication is that Oren has a wife and son back in Israel.

We skip ahead some time and the two men have fallen into a routine: Oren comes to Berlin for work, the two live together during his stay, at the end of Oren’s trip Thomas gives him a box of cookies for his wife, and the pair say goodbye for a month. However, little do they know, one of those goodbyes are for good as Thomas finds out after visiting Oren’s office that he was killed in a car crash in Israel.

This isn’t a spoiler. In fact, all I described happens in the opening ten minutes of the film. After Oren’s death, we switch to his wife Anat’s (Sarah Adler) perspective. When we meet her she is trying to adjust to life without her husband. She has to balance taking care of her son Itai (Tamir Ben-Yehuda), running her newly-opened cafe, and dealing with her brother Moti (Zohar Strauss), who is deeply strict in their Jewish faith. However, help soon arrives in the form of a mysterious German man looking for work. It’s Thomas who has traced Oren’s footsteps back to Israel.

Anat, eager for the help, hires Thomas to clean dishes and run errands. Little does she know that he is her husband’s lover. The two begin to build a relationship as Anat learns that Thomas is a baker and she begins selling his baked goods in the shop, much to Moti’s dismay—even Thomas using the oven isn’t kosher. Still, she continues to work with Thomas, which risks her finding out about his true identity, even though Oren’s mother Hanna (Sandra Sade) might know more than she lets on.

Like Moonlight a couple years ago, The Cakemaker uses the act of cooking for someone as a way to communicate care and love for someone. Director and screenwriter Ofir Raul Graizer also uses it as a point of contention—to emphasize the cultural divide that Hanna has to navigate with her brother regarding religion. At one point, frustrated with Moti’s effort to keep her restaurant (and son) kosher, she says, “I’m not religious and I don’t want to be religious.”

The Cakemaker is a quiet story. The characters don’t say much. Their thoughts are internalized and it takes a talented director and actors to communicate that. And Graizer has that talent, as does the entire cast, especially Kalkhof. Thomas doesn’t say much, but he holds all of his thoughts and emotions on his face. In one scene, something is revealed to him and the wave of emotions that go through his face are stunning. Without a single tear shed or smile he tells us the complexity of what he is feeling in the moment. It’s reminiscent of the famous train scene in Unfaithful that landed Diane Lane an Oscar nomination. Kalkhof is just as worthy here.

There’s a warmth to the movie that could be attributed to its longing piano score by Dominique Charpentier or the soft and functional cinematography by Omri Aloni. However, at the center of it all is Graizer’s empathetic direction and the human performances by the entire cast—there’s not a weak performance in the bunch. There is one plot point that I won’t spoil here that pulled away some of the magic of the film, but there’s no denying that The Cakemaker is something special. It’s comforting like a sweet dessert.

The Cakemaker is available on Blu-Ray on Amazon