In ‘The President’s Cake,’ Iraqi Movie Maker Delivers a Film of Rare Merit

One of my favorite moments during the run of Charles’ Schulz’s comic strip, “Peanuts,” featured Lucy, Linus and Charlie Brown lying on a grassy slope and gazing at the sky. Lucy remarks on the associative potentialities of clouds, and asks Linus what he is able to make out in them. Linus doesn’t miss a beat: A map of British Honduras, a profile of the American painter Thomas Eakins, and the stoning of Saint Stephen. “I can see the apostle Paul,” he adds, “standing there to one side.”When Lucy asks the same question of Charlie Brown, he responds with typical chagrin: “Well, I was going to say I saw a ducky and a horsie, but I changed my mind.” A similar sense of deflation washed over me upon coming across a review of Hasan Hadi’s feature debut, “The President’s Cake.” Mr. Hadi had, I thought, crafted a movie that located generosity and possibility within a context that would seem to preclude them — that is to say, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Such a gullible Westerner am I: “The President’s Cake” doesn’t realize its goals with breathtaking naturalism, understated measures, and a deft traversal of the winsome and the tragic. Rather, it “fulfills misconceptions of morbid Oriental cities reduced by despotic regimes to decadent theaters for the corrupt.” That’s the opinion of a Baghdad-based writer and photographer, Nabil Salih, writing in the pages of the online journal Jacobin.Mr. Salih goes on to lambaste Mr. Hadi for his bad faith: “Exorcising yesteryear’s ghosts turns a blind eye to the ruined future we inhabit today.” Grant the author a personal and political investment in the fortunes of his native land. Take note that the review appeared in a journal that trades in “socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture,” and then rue the obliviousness that often follows in the wake of ideology. Politics and prudery are rarely the friend of art; they are often its outright enemy.All of which is to say that “The President’s Cake” is, contrary to Mr. Salih’s intransigent thumbs-down, a film of rare merit and, as such, a benison on the body politic.Baneen Ahmed Nayyef and Sajad Mohamad Qasem in ‘The President’s Cake.’ Via Sony Pictures ClassicsMr. Hadi tells us that “I’m not interested in making a film that ‘preaches’ or a film that serves as propaganda for politicians.” Our filmmaker had to know he was treading on treacherous ground, particularly given that the story he tells is serio-comic in tone. The picture follows 9-year old Lamia (Baneen Ahmed Nayyef in an astonishing performance) and her coeval, Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), on a picaresque journey to gather the ingredients for a birthday cake.It’s a do-or-die situation, this venture. After a bullying teacher pulls Lamia’s name out of a hat, she is responsible for baking a cream cake in honor of Saddam’s upcoming birthday. The consequences for not doing so will be dire for Lamia and her grandmother Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat), not to mention a pet rooster called Hindi. The cake is a challenge this attenuated family is hard-pressed to meet: Lamia and Bibi live in poverty in the marshlands of southern Iraq. Simple baking ingredients are hard to come by. A trip to Baghdad is in the offing.Lamia’s adventures in the big city are wide-ranging, eye-opening, and rife with circumstances that test the mettle of her moral compass. The adult world is sometimes welcoming, often dangerous, and though Lamia encounters heartbreak on this journey, her senses of purpose and wonder only deepen as a result. She meets up with Saeed — he has, we learn, been assisting his father in picking pockets — and the pair do their damnedest to navigate not only Baghdad, but the limits of both their naivete and their cynicism.Does the “Glorious Leader” get his cake? Yes and no, and it’s to Mr. Hadi’s credit that he favors poetry over polemics, and ambiguity over certitude. “The President’s Cake” is an astonishing film that is both tough and tender in its particulars. The protestations of the perpetually aggrieved should not count a whit in deciding whether to exit the house for a night out at the movies.

In ‘The President’s Cake,’ Iraqi Movie Maker Delivers a Film of Rare Merit

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