Think Pink: Kyle MacLachlan plays a ghostly but gorgeous Cary Grant in Ian Iqbal Rashid's screwball debut, Touch of Pink.

Pink isn't the only touch openly gay writer-director Ian Iqbal Rashid brought to his delightfully comic feature film debut, Touch of Pink. He added a cross-cultural gay relationship, a sassy South Asian mother, Cary Grant's apparition, and at the center of it all, an Indian-Canadian gay man played by adorable U.K. star Jimi Mistry (The Guru).

"I wanted it to feel like an old-fashioned Hollywood romantic or screwball comedy--but with someone like me at the center of it," the stocky Rashid explains. "And with the waistline of my dreams!"

Mistry plays Alim, a Hollywood film-obsessed photographer who lives in London with his white boyfriend, Giles (Kristen Holden-Ried). All hell breaks loose when Alim's staunchly Muslim mother, Nuru (Suleka Mathew), makes a surprise visit. Alim frantically stashes all queer paraphernalia, claims Giles is a roommate, and even suggests that his fiancee is Giles's sister. But of course the truth comes out.

Having alienated everybody, Alim follows his mother to Toronto, where craziness ensues with a big fat Indian wedding and--of course--a Hollywood ending.

Presiding over the fun in true screwball style is Kyle MacLachlan as Cary Grant, Alim's chatty, charming, and imaginary confidant.

MacLachlan--who garnered plenty of gay attention with his slimy turn in the camp classic Showgirls--says his take on the Hollywood icon was that he would have a nebulous sexuality.

"[In the film Grant's] sexual orientation is completely open," says MacLachlan. "It's not established one way or the other. But more important, he has tremendous feelings of care for Jimi's character and doesn't want to see him hurt."

MacLachlan remembers feeling much the same when his best friend came out to him. "It was during the '80s," he says. "And my only words were, 'Please be careful, because of the situation with AIDS, because I don't want to lose you.'"

MacLachlan instantly lightens up. "And then [I said], 'Why are you telling me this? I've known for yeats. Come on!' He's still my best friend."

The sophisticated Cary Grant and his classic films--including That Touch of Mink--are just as important to director Rashid as they are to Alim. Born in Tanzania and raised in Toronto, Rashid is currently based in London with his partner of "13 monogamous years," Peter Ride. Yes, the relationship is cross-cultural: "Masala shepherd's pie--if you haven't had it, you haven't lived!" he gushes.

Then there's Rashid's own South Asian mother, "just as glamorous, bitchy, funny, and beautiful as Nuru," he laughs. Like Nuru, Rashid's mother was devastated when he first came out. "But she's really come around in a way I think Nuru will come around in a couple of years. I see her at a gay pride march in 14 months, max!"

Ferber has also written for Entertainment Weekly and Time Out New York.