Let Them Eat Cake

Saddam Hussein loved his birthday, and he ensured everyone else in Iraq loved it too. Each April 28, he received an ornate birthday cake of ludicrous proportions, while the whole country held compulsory celebrations. The mere title of “The President’s Cake” — the gentle, imperfect period drama from Iraqi filmmaker Hasan Hadi — brings to mind massive inequity, and the subsequent story explores the trickle-down effects of Hussein’s brutal authoritarianism, all through the eyes of a child tasked with baking a cake to honor Hussein’s rule.

The film’s opening captions place its events during the first Gulf War, in the early 1990s, when the average Iraqi was at the mercy of both Western sanctions — in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait — and Hussein’s own overtures toward privatization in the mid-’80s. However, its screenplay subsequently filters these political specifics (which have long been overshadowed by U.S. actions in the country this century) through the perspective of an impoverished schoolgirl. 

Nine-year-old Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef) lives with her grandmother — her “Bibi” (Waheed Thabet Khreibat) — in the sprawling Mesopotamian Marshes of Iraq’s southern border with Kuwait, mere miles from the ongoing conflict as she canoes to and from school. But she faces a truly daunting challenge when she is picked by her strict schoolmaster to bake a birthday cake celebrating Hussein, whose portrait adorns their classroom — he doesn’t appear in the movie, but his presence looms large — and whose praises the children are instructed to sing in the morning. Notably, Lamia’s teacher wants the cake filled with cream, a delicacy he’s been craving. It’s a small touch in the grand scheme of things, but whether or not Lamia is old enough to recognize it, the adults around her all (or mostly) use politics and national identity to their own advantage, however small.

This baking quest takes the naïve, wide-eyed schoolgirl, her watchful pet rooster Hindi and her rambunctious classmate Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem) to a nearby city to gather the necessary ingredients in a time of extreme scarcity. Their attempts to barter and steal lead them from a kindly, poetic mailman to an eager Francophile baker, an over-eager butcher and cinema-lover, and to multiple policemen — multifaceted characters whose passions all speak to a desire to escape, but some of whose untoward behavior speaks to unsavory motives born of self-preservation (if not outright malice). The world as seen through Lamia’s eyes is populated by people whose problems are, understandably, more pressing than confection.

The people in Hadi’s film, Iraq’s submission for this year’s Academy Awards, are all finely sketched, and are largely embodied by nonprofessional actors who bring a lived-in naturalism to each scene. However, its shortcomings are both aesthetic and conceptual. The environment itself never seems as imposing, as wondrous or as mysterious as Lamia’s interactions would imply, leaving the audience at a distance from her perspective. “The President’s Cake” is no “Where Is the Friend’s House?,” Iranian maestro Abbas Kiarostami’s riveting 1987 drama about a schoolboy who tries to return his classmate’s notebook in a neighboring town and becomes overwhelmed by the vastness of the world, its mystery and complex morality. The comparison might seem unfair, given the movies’ differing tones and political intents — Kiarostami’s film is far more surrealistic — but what they share is an affinity for magnifying society, as it exists, in the form of a neorealist fairy tale.

However, where Kiarostami’s adventure confronts his young protagonist with new questions at every turn about his place in an uncaring world — philosophical musings about morality, filtered down into a fable — Hadi’s seems to ask the same questions about economic issues ad nauseam. The interactions in “The President’s Cake” are all matter-of-fact, which imbues the story with a wry sensibility and a frankness surrounding the cruelty of men. But Lamia has no room within the narrative to consider the nature of the people she encounters, or what they might want from her, or how they might seek to acquire it — let alone on what she thinks these things might say about her. 

Hadi does an admirable job of capturing the cause-and-effect of how political frustrations curdle the social fabric; it’s hard for Lamia to trust any adult she meets. But given the movie’s functional, mechanical presentation, with scenes that seek to simply present situations rather than scrutinize them, the story’s rhythms end up homogenous. They plateau with little fluctuation, and with few flutters of the head or heart, the kind of sparks that might have — in a more rigorously considered film — afforded Lamia even the slightest unpredictability, or the possibility of any change in decision-making beyond which direction to sprint. The yarn that remains has little excitement or intrigue. 

Everything that “The President’s Cake” observes about Iraqi society, at this specific moment in time, can be inferred from the opening text, which lays out the struggles of average citizens facing harsh financial realities. The combined result of sanctions and Iraq’s decade of deregulation was an uptick in child mortality, making Hadi’s choice of protagonist all the more poignant. While there is still debate over who is to blame for this tragic statistic, the film ultimately isn’t interested in the root causes of this impoverishment and suffering — let alone more recent ripple effects of Western militarism — but rather in their impact on the social contract.

That the story is politically astute is well worth lauding. However, the human side of its saga — about a girl molded by the world around her, at least in theory — only comes into its own in its final, harrowing moments, in which the camera finally embodies the world at its most dangerous (and has its child characters act accordingly, too). Despite the film’s intellectual prowess, the 105-minute wait for this crescendo, with little to say in the interim, can’t help but feel like a dramatic misstep.