QUEEN TUT
Directed by Reem Morsi
Released September 25, 2023
The title, Queen Tut, is essentially a spoiler. Our young hero, Nabil (Ryan Ali), doesn’t choose it as his drag name until near the end of the film.
That doesn’t matter because there’s plenty more in his story to occupy your mind. Nabil’s age is never specified. He’s probably older than he looks (early 20s?) but he’s still struggling with coming out as gay, and still living with one or the other of his divorced parents.
After his mother dies, Nabil travels from Cairo to Toronto to move in with Iskander (Dani Jazzar), the father he hasn’t seen for several years.
One of the first people Nabil meets there is Malibu (Alexandra Billings), a trans woman who runs and performs in a drag bar, Mandy’s, named for her late wife. The bar is threatened by developers who want the space for condos, and Malibu is organizing the LGBTQ+ community to fight to save their gathering place.
Still, when Nabil shows an interest in her costumes, Malibu finds time to teach him to sew, something he never learned from his mother, who was a seamstress and fashion designer. He has her sketches for a grand dress she never completed. Perhaps he will be able to make it? Perhaps even wear it?
In the meantime, Malibu adopts the shy newcomer into the Mandy’s family of performers: Thom Allison as Sheyonce, Kiriana Stanton as Ryan aka Taz DeVille, Dariush Zadeh as Decaf, and Nicky Nasrallah as HabibTease.
Nabil resumes attending the Coptic Orthodox Church with his father. His mother had been thrown out of the church for being divorced. Another young man catches Nabil’s eye in the church (and rest assured, they will meet elsewhere). At this point, Nabil has one foot in the church, one foot in a drag bar and one foot still in the closet. And, his father happens to be an executive in the development company Malibu is at war with.
The many threads of the plot are woven together as finely as those of the dress Nabil is working on. Queen Tut , available on many streaming services, was written by three screenwriters, none of whom seem to have a sense of humor. Malibu’s drag queens and kings have some happy times, but I don’t think there’s a single laugh-out-loud moment. That’s not a fatal flaw, but some comic relief would have offered some levity to the plot.
On the other hand, with so many somber subjects, also including immigrants from many Middle Eastern countries and their descendants mingling in a multiethnic neighborhood, Queen Tut doesn’t feel nearly as heavy as it could have been. Nabil has one tearful scene that lets Ali overact a little, but most of the film compels us to take the story seriously without feeling depressed or overwhelmed.
Director Reem Morsi, an Egyptian-Canadian woman, manages to strike the right balance in just about every scene, keeping the story so believable it gives us hope that our problems in the real world can work out just as well.
Steve Warren recently marked his 50th anniversary of writing, mostly about entertainment, for the LGBTQ+ press.
