The Cakemaker **** (2017, Tim Kalkhof, Sarah Adler, Roy Miller, Zohar Shtrauss) – Movie Review 

Tim Kalkhof gives the warmest and most appealing of performances as Tomas, a gay German pastry maker working in a tasty cake shop and cafe in Berlin, where a married man Oren (Roy Miller) arrives and asks for his help in finding a birthday present for his six-year-old son.

The two men become regular lovers as Oren arranges monthly business trips to Berlin. Then one time, he leaves Berlin for Jerusalem, forgetting his keys and his little cake for his wife, and never returns, never answering Tomas’s calls.

[Spoiler alert} Tomas finds his lover has been killed in a car accident in Jerusalem, and decides to travel there in search of his lover’s wife Anat (Sarah Adler) and little boy. Anat is also running a cafe, a Kosher cafe, and Tomas stops off for a coffee and cake, and asks if she needs any help in the cafe.

Writer-director Ofir Raul Graizer’s warm-hearted first feature is haunting and charming, with a pleasant, unassuming, quietly dignified look about it, but with plenty on its mind and an ideal way to express it. The film is as delicously sweet and tasty as one of Tomas’s cakes, and is baked to perfection with the same loving care he puts into it. The subjects are loss, mourning, grief, loss, loneliness, prejudice, honour, dignity, love – oh there’s a lot of values examined here. It is more bitter-sweet than sweet. That’s its flavour.

Both the gay character and the straight wife are admirable human beings – strong, independent, thoughtful, wise and kind of adorable, at least as played by Kalkhof and Adler. These characters are brave role models for the rest of us. That makes the film sound dull and lecturing. It is exactly the opposite of that. It’s totally involving, quietly glorious, telling the truth for once, in fact a whole series of truths.

It is tooth-aching nice, I guess, but it is full of real sentiment and not really sentimental at all. It even pulls off an effective ending, one that you don’t quite expect.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Movie Review 

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Tim Kalkhof plays Tomas, a gay German pastry maker.