Cupcakes (2013, Anat Waxman, Ofer Shechter) – Movie Review

Co-writer/director Eytan Fox’s nostalgia-minded tale is a gloriously cute, camp and charming comedy that takes a Eurovision-style song contest as its starting point and delivers lots of laughs, one or two tears, some very daft songs and a few pieces of its mind.

Six diverse Tel Aviv friends, five women and a gay guy in a tutu, gather to watch the Universong competition on TV. Depressed by the lifelessness of the Israeli entry, a parody of many recent offerings, a flashy, grating song about amour, they jokingly compose and sing A Song for Anat to cheer up one of their group, Anat (appealingly played by Anat Waxman) a middle-aged baker whose marriage is in trouble. They are as surprised as anyone when it is chosen as Israel’s entry for next year’s competition.

Ofer Shechter is sensational as Ofer, a nursery-school teacher who is upset that his boyfriend, a spokes-person and model boy for his family’s famous brand of hummus, is still in the closet and won’t publicly acknowledge their romance. And that’s the big deal that the film’s got on its mind.

A Song for Anat is actually the work of Babydaddy, from Scissor Sisters.

Fox is the director of Yossi & Jagger (2002), a portrayal of the love between two young Jewish military men while completing their mandatory national service, and Walk on Water (2004), which tackles the thorny topics of racism and discrimination and confronts the Nazi past of two young upper-class Germans. He is openly gay and many of his films tackle themes of homosexuality, as well as the effect the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has on inter-personal relationships. Fox and his partner, writer and journalist Gal Uchovsky, have been together for 24 years. They are also professional collaborators and Uchovsky is involved in much of the scriptwriting for Fox’s movies.

(C) Derek Winnert 2014