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

Eytan Fox’s nostalgia-minded film Cupcakes 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.

Co-writer/director Eytan Fox’s nostalgia-minded tale Cupcakes 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.

Fox said he wanted to make a feel-good movie and that’s exactly what he’s done.

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

The cast are Yael Bar Zohar as Yael, Dana Ivgy as Dana, Anat Waxman as Anat, Keren Berger as Keren, Efrat Dor as Efrat and Ofer Shechter as Ofer.

Written by Eytan Fox and Eli Bijaou, the 2013 Israeli Hebrew-language musical comedy film is also known as Bananot (literally Bananas).

Release date: 14 February 2013.

Running time: 89 minutes.

Israeli film director Eytan 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 family 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.

Eytan Fox (born on August 21, 1964) is also noted for 2006 film The Bubble, the 2012 film Yossi (the sequel to Yossi & Jagger), Cupcakes (Bananot) (2013) and Sublet (2020).

(C) Derek Winnert 2014