You may have heard how difficult it is to be gay in Arab countries. The String (Le Fil) makes it look easy. Director and co-writer Mehdi Ben Attia serves up a lite drama with very little conflict, in which love conquers homophobia, class warfare, xenophobia, misogyny—virtually everything but the common cold.
It’s all quite watchable and there are enough serious films on these topics that you can be excused for taking a night off to observe the world more or less as it should be, in hopes that today’s fantasy will be tomorrow’s reality.
Sara (Claudia Cardinale) shocked her French family some 40 years ago when she moved to Tunisia to marry an Arab. Now it’s her turn to be shocked—but only briefly—when her son Malik (Antonin Stahly) moves back to Tunisia to live with her in her fabulous seaside villa a few months after her husband’s death. She should know he’s gay but she’s in denial and keeps him from telling her until she catches him in bed with a handsome servant, Bilal (Salim Kechiouche).
It takes Malik and Bilal half the movie to hook up but once they do they face only the most minor of difficulties.
Malik is an architect designing a mosque that’s run into a roadblock over how to provide parking. That’s never resolved but it serves to introduce Malik’s lesbian co-worker, Sirine (Ramla Ayari), who plans to have a baby by artificial insemination with her partner, Leila (Abir Bennani). Malik signs on to marry Sirine to give the baby a nominal father and make his own mother and grandmother happy.
Sirine and Leila are open about their relationship and Malik has a cousin, Wassim (Ali M’Rabet), who’s openly and obviously gay. None of them have trouble being accepted by friends and family, and it doesn’t take Malik’s mother long to adjust to his new status (although as written she seems somewhat bipolar anyway).
Cardinale, though rarely seen in the United States since the ’60s, provides star power as well as authenticity, as she was raised in Tunisia (though of Italian, not French descent). Stahly and Kechiouche are decent actors with average faces and nice bodies, which thanks to that darned Tunisian sun they have to display frequently.
The string of the title is an imaginary one Malik was obsessed with as a child. It manifests itself in various ways, from B&D fantasies to unraveling sweaters and a water ski rope. Since there’s not much of a plot the movie has to fill time with something.
With Amazon.com selling used copies of SCARCE (www.myspace.com/scarcemovie) for as little as $4.79, Steve understands what Bette Midler meant in Ruthless People when she said, “I’ve been kidnapped by K-Mart!”