For a family-romance drama — a term that doesn’t gel with the genre, given its premise — Luv Di Saun starts in the most unlikely of places with the most unlikely of scenes: a dust-covered apartment in a state of near ruin and a mouse hunt. Zarshaan (Farhan Saeed, the film’s only saving grace) runs after the rodent as it jumps and scuttles from an old piano to a typewriter.
Although far from entertaining, it is by far the most interesting scene in a film that starts from nowhere, dawdles aimlessly, chooses to tell half a story, and ends with a “To Be Continued” bumper.
One can’t help but feel that story writer, director and producer Imran Malik is insisting that the remaining, presumably better half, rests in a sequel. A sequel that may never come to pass.
When one views the film in that context, can one really blame the lead character for being sad?
For the purposes of the story, we learn the source of Zarshaan’s sorrow through low-quality, AI-rendered flashbacks. His parents (Usman Peerzada and Saba Hameed) were researchers who had everything — money, a mansion, and a thriving business in Thailand — but lost it all thanks to a bad investment.
In one atrocious AI flashback, we see them perishing in a highway accident. Zarshaan, being the driver, is ridden with guilt. Or is he?
Penniless, sensible and cheerful enough when not sad — though we never quite understand why a grown man chooses wallowing over taking charge of his life despite his hardships — he helps a disabled boy retrieve a kite. At the end of the kite-chase he ends up — again, with AI-assisted inserts — in an apartment where several young women live.
Presumably an astute, worldly-wise young man (probably because Saeed plays him that way), he fails to notice that there is something off about these women.
For starters, they have no elders in the house, dress conspicuously and strut home late at night from parties, claiming that they’re coming from a shrine. They’re also scared of the law — when sirens blare, they scramble to hide beneath the bed.
It is revealed late in the film (insert dull surprise here) that they are prostitutes. The film chooses to call them ‘ Tawaiafs ’. Given that he is from Thailand — a country where prostitution thrives with a $6 to $8 billion annual turnover — it is hard to excuse his naivety, or the screenplay’s insistence upon it.
As was bound to happen, our hero falls somewhat in love with Billo (Mamya Shajaffar), the spunky, wide-eyed heroine who doesn’t blink.
“Somewhat” is the operative word here. There is no build-up to the romance, even when 70 per cent of the film unfolds within the confines of two sets that function as Zarshaan’s perpetually messy apartment. The very apartment whose room he rents to the two women.
While the audience tries to make sense of the relationship between the two leads, three side-tracks are shoehorned into the running narrative.
The first is the comic relief, Sardar Happy Singh (Rana Ijaz) — a good-hearted, lascivious sleaze-bag who befriends Zarshaan and then asks him to spy on his cheating wife (Happy, by the way, was cheating on her as well).
The second track involves Sureet (Mehrunisa Iqbal), a Hindu girl abducted at a young age and forced into prostitution. Like Happy’s track, this does not fit naturally into the narrative.
The third — and just as ill-fitting as the other two — features the eternally, manically happy villain (Tabrez Khan), who lives off the prostitutes’ earnings. Apparently a pretty big deal, this unhinged bad guy is never given scenes that establish who he really is or what makes him tick.
These scattered ideas — one cannot even call them a fully mapped-out story — lumber along until the pacing collapses under its own weight. Then the unthinkable happens: screenwriter Wajid Zuberi and Malik flip the script 180 degrees by introducing Babar Ali.
Ali plays one of Luv Di Saun’s two “other” heroes. He is the bodyguard of a billionaire (Rashid Khwaja) searching for his empire’s heir.
No points for guessing that Billo is the heir. After all, as she herself says in a scene, she always felt she didn’t quite belong in the life she was living, even though she is often seen having a ball.
The other “other” hero enters just before the climax: Humayun Saeed. Pakistani cinema’s unassailable superstar plays an unassailable Dabangg -style police officer who holds a tasbeeh in his killer hands. The man frees kidnapped women, looks up to the Almighty for permission, and then saves Zarshaan after he is beaten to a pulp.
By now, Luv Di Saun has thrown Farhan Saeed’s character to the sidelines, abandoning the idea of a simple wrong-side-of-the-tracks love story and replacing it with a plot-line that makes little to no sense.
And yet the film is still not over. The aforementioned “To Be Continued” bumper hits the viewer like a sledgehammer, alluding to a far bigger story that’s left up in the air. A story worth, perhaps, 10 minutes of screen time.
One fails to see the bigger picture here. For a good two and a half hours, the audience is forced to accept an unmapped half-picture — one that is amateurishly edited, badly sound-designed, and constricted to a few sets — only to be told that even this minuscule story has been left incomplete.
One wonders if Luv Di Saun is worse than Imran Malik’s last film, Azaadi , starring Moammar Rana and Sonya Hussyn. It is definitely better acted — though only because of Saeed, who is on-screen for 80 per cent of the runtime; it is also better shot (the director of photography is Syed Faisal Bukhari), and has a decent song or two. But these few qualities do not equate to a better experience.
For the most part, the long running time desperately tries to build characters. Both Zarshaan and Billo have scenes that could have added dimension and emotional resonance; instead, they feel fake and superficial. After a while, the entire exercise grows repetitive.
Being boring is the least of Luv Di Saun’s problems, though. The bigger issue is its failure to figure out its own story — and without a story brimming with passion, conviction, conflict, and forward momentum, what is left in a film other than wasted hours?
