When handsome young Malik returns home to Tunisia from France to take up work as an architect, he moves back in with his widowed mom, and why not? She's Claudia Cardinale! And her house is fabulous. (The shaded pavilion with a view of the sea is my favorite part of the estate, but the garden with the huge palm trees and orange hammock is pretty nice, too...and so is Malik's bathroom with the amazing tile...this is world-class real estate.)
Unknown to mom, Malik is gay; mostly he seems attracted to the rough trade guys who hang out in a certain part of town just waiting to service rich boys like Malik, but there's this achingly cute young handyman (even cuter than Malik) living in Mom's servant quarters who keeps catching his eye, Bilal. It turns out there is more to Bilal than meets the eye, but you won't find that out until later.
Meanwhile, to satisfy mom and give the kid a father, Malik is planning to marry his work partner, a coupled lesbian who's having a baby by artificial insemination. The lesbian's father is unbelievably cool with all this. I want to be as cool as that old guy some day.
Where is all this heading? To another tragic gay movie where somebody dies? I don't think I require a spoiler alert to tell you that "The String" is not that sort of movie. This is a loving, wise, subtle, witty, sophisticated, erotic, almost Utopian vision of how life should be, a tonic to all those well-made but often dreary movies about gay life outside the urban gay Meccas of the West.
The acting is terrific (Malik's face tells many stories), the sense of humor is spot-on, Cardinale is simultaneously the scariest and best mother a gay boy could ever hope for, and the whole movie is beautifully directed, especially the scene where Bilal comes to Malik and humbly asks to borrow his shoes, because his own outfit isn't classy enough to get him into a trendy club. So much happens in this scene, it's like a little movie in itself. It sets in motion everything that comes afterward.
(PS: I just found out that the movie won the Best Feature audience award at the San Francisco Frameline film fest, where I saw it. Well deserved.)
Unknown to mom, Malik is gay; mostly he seems attracted to the rough trade guys who hang out in a certain part of town just waiting to service rich boys like Malik, but there's this achingly cute young handyman (even cuter than Malik) living in Mom's servant quarters who keeps catching his eye, Bilal. It turns out there is more to Bilal than meets the eye, but you won't find that out until later.
Meanwhile, to satisfy mom and give the kid a father, Malik is planning to marry his work partner, a coupled lesbian who's having a baby by artificial insemination. The lesbian's father is unbelievably cool with all this. I want to be as cool as that old guy some day.
Where is all this heading? To another tragic gay movie where somebody dies? I don't think I require a spoiler alert to tell you that "The String" is not that sort of movie. This is a loving, wise, subtle, witty, sophisticated, erotic, almost Utopian vision of how life should be, a tonic to all those well-made but often dreary movies about gay life outside the urban gay Meccas of the West.
The acting is terrific (Malik's face tells many stories), the sense of humor is spot-on, Cardinale is simultaneously the scariest and best mother a gay boy could ever hope for, and the whole movie is beautifully directed, especially the scene where Bilal comes to Malik and humbly asks to borrow his shoes, because his own outfit isn't classy enough to get him into a trendy club. So much happens in this scene, it's like a little movie in itself. It sets in motion everything that comes afterward.
(PS: I just found out that the movie won the Best Feature audience award at the San Francisco Frameline film fest, where I saw it. Well deserved.)