Le fil

The technically competent 2009 gay love story Le Fil (The String) stars one of the grandest dames of European cinema, Claudia Cardinale, emoting majestically in the land of her 1938 birth, Tunisia. Writer-director Mehdi Ben Attia's debut feature wraps her in a rich, sheltered environment, neither French nor Tunisian, neither European/modern nor Arabic/traditional, as a mother of an only son whose homosexuality she appears to despise, especially when it crosses class and racial lines. Then she accepts it, inexplicably, and everybody lives happily ever after: the movie serves only to illustrate that movie-making is a universal toy for any country's rich and elite.

Malik is the central anti-heroic figure, returned from France to his European mother's fairly grand estate. His Arabic father's death has died, and the young man's best friends are a boldly out fashionable couple of Arab lesbian lovers for whom he agrees to be a husband and semen donor. The director reveals his hero's preferences early on, when the man asks to be raped by a hunk of rough trade in an unnamed city (Tunis).

As a boy, he'd needed a long string (of the title) tied to his waist to guide him out of involuntary pacing in circles, and it makes occasional real or imaginary appearances - without helping the storyline, other than to suggest that he'd long needed a human link to reality. This he finds in a manly houseboy working for free board and lodging at his mother's. His homosexuality appears to be unexpressed, unrealised, and then, suddenly, it isn't, and he's in bed with the supposed fiance. This transition was so sudden I feared I'd jumped a chapter or the movie lost one.

Lead actor Antonin Stahly-Vishawanadan (as handsome, pensive, sulky Malik) does not have an extensive record in movies. He's first noted in IMDb as "The Boy" in the 1989 French TV mini-series presentation of Peter Brook's Mahabharata. In 2002, he worked for Brook again, as Osric in the TV movie, The Tragedy of Hamlet. His lover, Blilal, is played confidently by French-born TV actor Salim Kechiouche, but his role is difficult to comprehend, as a working-class artist accepted by a society of rich snobs.

Maybe the director imagined a small world where gays and fag hags could find sunlit happiness, oblivious to the barbaric realities at the gates of Tunisia. Many gay movie-goers would be happy to escape into such a dream world; many gay movies are far from real worlds.