They say a novelist is as good as his or her second novel. This can be debated because there are fiction writers — Milan Kundera and J.M. Coetzee, for example — whose later works have given them more acclaim than their first couple of books.

Similarly, there are film-makers who evolved as they kept fine-tuning their craft, and the more films they made, the better they became. One sincerely hopes that this proves to be the case with the young Nabeel Qureshi whose second film, Actor In Law (AIL), was premiered on Eidul Azha.

Nabeel is a talented director. Two things stand out in his work: his knack for using satire without a hint of didacticism and the wholeheartedness with which he makes movies. AIL is made with a lot of heart, and it shows. The director, like all his countrymen, appears to be perturbed by how certain issues have come to haunt society. He highlights that without sounding philosophical or being politically correct. The route that he takes is one of light-heartedness where two professions — acting and the practice of law — swap places only to realise that they are misused by individuals. Kudos for that! But then, at the end of the day, film-making is storytelling and in order to tell a story, a socially relevant one at that, you need to go the extra mile, which is where the craft of storytelling comes in handy.

AIL narrates the tale through a Parsi television reporter Meenu played by Mehwish Hayat of an aspiring actor Shan Mirza (Fahad Mustafa). He is the son of an upright lawyer Rafaqat Mirza (Om Puri) who does not approve of his son’s penchant for acting. Shan, dreaming of making it big in showbiz, does all in his capacity to grab a role in a film. As fate would have it, things get botched up and he suffers humiliating rejections. After one such incident, Shan has a strange encounter with a poor petitioner, while he is picking things off his father’s office desk, which lands him in a court of law and his role in the story changes. This sparks off a series of events where Shan tries to resolve issues that the common man is plagued with as a (fake) lawyer.

Actor In Law is very watchable but disappoints in its narrative

AIL is predicated on an idea which is perhaps not that innovative. All credit to the director and his able producer Fizza Ali Meerza for peppering the concept with some hilarious (what soccer experts call) set-pieces. They enable the audience to have a hearty laugh without losing out on the message that is being conveyed. The grave issues of bigotry, electricity outages, media manipulation and showbiz vapidity are underlined with considerable social acumen. A scene in which Meenu and Shan put on burqas to see if the boys ogle at girls who don’t wear skimpy dresses required particular cheek to conceive and execute.

But only if set-pieces could help tell a story the way it should be told. The marked feature of Nabeel’s first film Na Maloom Afraad was that it had a befitting climax. With AIL, the climax was achieved or reached (take your pick) way before the film ended. The audience knows that Rafaqat will eventually have a change of heart and come to the rescue of his son. Ironically, that change of heart takes place in a single shot, when he is in a taxi hounded by the resonant sound of media chants, and that’s the biggest shortcoming of the film: character development. Rafaqat’s character is so one-dimensional and underdeveloped that he doesn’t sound different even when he feels the need for sounding different.

Shan and Meenu’s relationship blossoms abruptly. Once that happens, it doesn’t have any relevance to the plot. In fact, Meenu’s fearless personality goes totally off on a tangent when she finds that Shan has left her in the lurch and she delivers that lame ‘main aik aurat ke taur per’ [as a woman] spiel.

The biggest disappointment, however, is Om Puri. It is beyond an avid cinephile to understand as to why he was cast in a role that any actor [Indian, Pakistani, Chinese, Caucasian] would have done with the same tone and tenor. There are no layers to his character. And Puri does such a pedestrian job of it (with his hoarse voice) that it leaves you wondering as to what made him say yes to the part and why the makers of AIL were so eager to hire him. Also, with his more than noticeable paunch Puri is hardly able to move in the last courtroom scene, creating a semblance of movement only by stretching his hands out. Both Meenu and Rafaqat come across as a lot of Mr Hyde in the film and a bit of Dr Jekyll — and that transformation happened in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.

A series of rain sequences too initially give the impression as if the director wants to use them as a larger, meaningful metaphor. Nope, no metaphor here. Only water, and lots of it. Why? The point being: for a movie that intends to tackle social evils, it is important to have your characters properly fleshed out. This means that the Rafaqat and the Meenu-Shan tracks needed at least a few more scenes to complete their trajectory. Well, since experience is the name we give to our mistakes, and given the oodles of talent that Nabeel and Fizza have, despite all of these reservations, one can’t wait to see what they do next.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine September 25th, 2016