a piece of cake
by Douglas Messerli
Deborah Devyn Chuang (screenwriter and director) 草莓蛋糕(Strawberry
Shortcake) / 2025 [21 minutes]
This little short “cake” about the perfect 16-year-old
daughter, Lolo (Heme Liao), who gets such good grades at school that her mother
(Rou-Ming Huang) awards her a gift of her favorite, strawberry shortcake, has
made its way through most of the major film festivals, gay and straight.
I can’t
quite explain, however, why it has been so popular since what follows is a dual
fantasy, first of the young girl being covered head to toe, or perhaps I should
say toe to head, since this young girl also has a foot fetish, with the mushed
up shortcake and berries while the mother slowly licks it off with her tongue.
A short
while later, after we see Lolo reading her foot-fetish manual in her bedroom,
she fantasizes an even more lurid event, her now agèd and ailing mother being
cared for by her caring offspring before she begins to stuff the gooey
shortcake down her mother’s throat.
Clearly,
the sweet obedient Lolo has some serious issues with her demanding mama.
The film
ends with Lolo calmly eating her breakfast as a schoolgirl friend calls her out
for their trip to school.
This
little nightmare even won several awards and people like Letterboxd commentator
Michael Watkins were highly impressed:
“'Masochism as food stuff' is something you rarely
see in film, but in this series of shorts, it happened twice. The first time
proved infinitely more captivating, as Strawberry Shortcake uses pretty mature
visual storytelling as a way of finding the crossovers between base desires and
queerness. A little nod to Persona also didn't harm its chances of
winning me over.”
I realized
as I watched this Taiwanese Freudian fantasy at New York City’s Newfest just
how disinterested I was in a lesbian fantasy which involved a mother and
daughter playing out foot and food fetishes. It just isn’t my thing, I guess.
Los Angeles, October 15, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October
2025).
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