This week we watched the movie Cake which is a 2018 Pakistani movie. This movie had lots of family drama but also felt like not much happened in its just over 2 hour runtime. The movie follow a very wealth family and their happening starting with the hospitalisation of their father and his at Home care and ultimately ends with the deaths of their mother, uncovering family secrets and to me what seems to be everyone having more unresolved issues than at the start.
This is really the first movie I’m not 100% sure what’s going on in for most of the time. I think it has to do with the massive increase in dialogue over the last two week and potentially the importance of the music seemingly through this movie. Music that I cannot understand unless it is the only thing happening meaning it is subtitled. There was also an interesting mix of English almost randomly throughout this movie.
My first cultural observance of not was Romeo was wearing a cross which I speculated was the reason for him being unable to have a relationship with Zareen. I think this was due to my own christian faith an upbringing it was easily noticeable any attributed due to hearing stories of this being reasons for Vietnamese people being kick out of families
However it just appears that Romeo was seen as less than Zareen because she came from money and he was a poor guy and one who even went to prison for her sister which she didn’t know about. so this basically tells me my initial reaction about the cultural represented in this movie were not on point.
Next my expectations were again subverted as the Title of the movie ‘Cake’ seemed to be far less significant than I have come to expect from western movies.
This may be because I missed some deeper cultural meaning of cake being some kind of representation for the mix of all the people coming together to eventually make something good but I can’t seem to find any cultural link there and the end of the movie wasn’t exactly a happy resolved ending.
I really think I missed a lot of the cultural and subtle hints about what was happening in this movie throughout due to most of the songs not being subtitled. When the songs were subtitled the words were always very relevant to what was happening on screen in a lyrical sense and I think I missed out on some of the cues a Vietnamese person may have not even noticed they were picking up on throughout the movie.
Honestly I don’t think I took much apart for that. I don’t understand what is going on at all in Pakistani culture from this movie. It had an element of rich people can avoid anything even the law if their money pays. Rich people still have family problems. Death is unexpected. Hiding something from someone for their own good never really works well. Lying to family causes issues. But these all just seem to be me trying to make sense of what I have seen through my own cultural sense and not seeing what is culturally unique and different coming through in this movie.