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The TV spots for Love Guru, Humayun Saeed’s newest, big-budget-starrer with a tell-tale title, should currently be bombarding viewers non-stop on ARY Digital and its sister channels in this last stretch of its publicity campaign.

I recall when this story began. I was visiting not the movie’s set, but its place of conception: Six Sigma, Humayun’s and Shahzad Nasib’s production office. The air was calmer than usual at Six Sigma though, beneath the calm, one could sense plenty of pressure. It was the kind of pressure only a big company with big resources could muster the courage to wave off nonchalantly.

The unspoken tension in the air was because, even then, the air in the film business was thinner; its supply of breathable oxygen (ie good films) dwindling. Humayun’s last, London Nahin Jaunga (LNJ), came out three years ago, and was a big earner that signalled a pseudo return to form after Covid-19 ruined cinema for good (2018 is considered the most profitable year for Pakistani cinema). Alas, since 2022, only one film has made more than LNJ.

Cut to today and one foresees a frightening cold spell after Love Guru’s release; with the exception of ARY’s Luv Di Saun, starring Farhan Saeed and set to release later this year, a few films are in production.

So, the million-dollar question (an amount, one believes is nearly equal to the film’s total cost when converting dollars to rupees) becomes: how do you make people believe a film is worth their time and money?

There is another dilemma that now needs dealing with: international distribution — which is mostly run by the Indian studios; getting the film to screens may become a problem after the recent military skirmish with India.

Thankfully, Love Guru is not the kind of film that invites or instigates hostilities. In fact, it may broker peace and give international audiences — and that includes the Indian diaspora — a reason to trust Pakistani cinema once again.

The film, nearly given away in its trailer, is a romantic comedy. In the film, Humayun plays a self-styled “guru” of love who uses his (and screenwriter Vasay Chaudhry’s penned) charm and wit to woo a girl before she says “qabool hai!” [I do!] to the other hero. However, it is no mere modern rom-com about ruining weddings and runaway brides.

The pitch, according to director Nadeem Baig — Humayun’s go-to compadre-director for his films and tentpole dramas — is that this may well be cinema’s return to classic rom-coms from the ‘90s — *My Best Friend’s Wedding, Notting Hill, Pretty Woman* — the kind of easygoing romances that made Julia Roberts a worldwide star.

Love Guru stars Robert’s Pakistani equivalent, Mahira Khan. It is her first pairing with Humayun since Bin Roye.

When Nadeem shows me all six songs from the movie — all of them different, five of them spectacular — in a dingy editing room, one lets go of all doubts about the cliche the title brings to mind. Mahira has the aura of a Hollywood leading lady (when they used to have that aura) and Humayun, his charisma formidable, his comedy timing pitch-perfect, is a stellar match. It is funny why no one thought of this film with this cast before.

The cast, other than those featured in the trailer, also includes Ramsha Khan and Ahmed Ali Butt (his part, and the first 15 minutes, I am told, will remind one of Jawani Phir Nahin Aani).

Ramsha’s song, ‘Raat ke hain saaye’, a peppy romantic number sung by Aima Baig and music directed by Shaani Arshad, shows the actress’ character wooing Humayun in a homage to those old Bollywood songs where side characters or sirens would woo broad-shouldered, uninterested leading men. However, this isn’t ‘70s Bollywood (or Lollywood); the vibe, and the song’s tenor, do not carry an iota of sexed-up sultriness.

“I don’t want to do Bollywood — that is why you will find this song cute, innocent and fast-paced,” Nadeem tells me when the song is over. “Pakistani films and their music have a distinct identity,” Nadeem says, emphasising the challenge of perfecting music and script over actor performances — which he knows they will deliver.

“We excel in romantic-tragic songs due to TV OSTs [original soundtracks],” he notes, telling Icon that Love Guru’s music took him a year to make. “You can’t find all the music in one director. I’m a bit greedy, so I want every song to shine, which is why I collaborate with others.”

The film features a diverse set of music directors: Saad Sultan, Shaani Arshad, Shiraz Uppal and Jaam Boys. This exercise began with Punjab Nahin Jaungi, he says, when Shiraz Uppal, despite his four contributions, couldn’t nail a particular song — the one he had made was excellent but not the song Nadeem was looking for — so Nadeem reached out to Shaani Arshad and ‘Tere naal naal rehna’ was born.

Good songs give Nadeem a way to deliver key cinematic moments, he says — some of them being pulled off only in the nick of time.

“I just had this vision, you know,” Nadeem recalls, “Of Mahira’s twirl in the song ‘Toot gaya’ — she spins, stops, hand still up, thinking of him. And then there was this shot of Humayun on a bench that just popped into my head, completely unscripted. We found the perfect spot but, being in London, it was raining with only 30 minutes of light! We scrambled and nailed the shot in 20 [minutes].

“Then Mahira really wanted a running shot in a sari. I told her the choreographer had left, but she insisted. We were shooting in an old ruin, and I spotted a big tree out there, so we hauled the jib over — which was an ordeal — but honestly, that shot just makes the whole moment sing.”

At this moment I ask Nadeem whether giving the entire crux of the story in the trailer was a good idea.

“I believe in honesty with the audience. I want to show them exactly what they’ll get,” Nadeem says. He dislikes vague trailers, he says, noting a recent Rajkumar Rao film that revealed everything, yet still enticed him to watch the full film to see its execution.

Nadeem insists that he hasn’t given much away, including the identity of the mystery hero alluded to in the trailer — and he doesn’t tell me who that actor is, no matter how hard I push, or no matter how many names I guess. “This film is a return of sorts to a lost feeling cinema had,” he stresses, changing the subject.

“At this time, everything is issue-based. Every film, even if it is a light-hearted comedy, it has to be about something. Romance has been left behind. It’s about coming back to the old romance — not old in terms of Humayun and Mahira,” he jests, taking a dig at the comments that say his lead actors are not the 20-year-olds people expect in movies.

While one often sees mature people in romantic comedies — teen/20-year-old romances only happen rarely in romantic tragedies — Humayun Saeed, talking to Icon the day after, says that “it all depends on what type of a film one is making.” He cites George Clooney and Liam Neeson, who play their age in romantic comedies, and whose films outperform those by young actors.

One of the key reasons he does his own films is because, as a producer, he is exploiting himself as an actor, he says.

“I am helping myself to make a movie. We don’t make many movies here — especially those that work. Allah has given me success. If I had failed, I would have considered giving someone else a chance to play the lead,” he says in guileless plain-speak.

“My average is one film every two years, not two films every year, otherwise it would have been a different scenario,” he says. “So people [in my production company] want to use me and, in turn, I am using myself.”

There is also a sort of emotional attachment, and perhaps the power of genuine, sympathetic prayer, from the audience’s side working its magic as well, he explains. “Since I’ve been doing it for so long, and with such consistency, I’ve heard people say ‘Allah karay is ka kaam chalay’ [May God let his films do good business]. The emotion behind the sentence stuck with me.”

Playing a macho, larger-than-life hero is a necessity, he says, because one has to accommodate every faction of the audience, be it youngsters, families, men — who gravitate towards action and stylised heroes — to women, who favour romance, explaining the need to have a “12 masalay ki chaat” [a mix of every flavour], especially for cinema.

For those who think Humayun is stuck playing an unassailable hero who makes or breaks weddings, his next flip everything around. Main Manto Nahin Hoon, his new drama with Nadeem that also stars Sajal Aly, looks like a movie and gives Humayun the means to play-act as a witty, meek, spectacle-wearing, stuttering, clever guy in a mystery-drama. After that is JPNA 3, which he stresses will go on sets later this year no matter what, and then the Taken-ish romance-actioner Mirza Jatt.

As we talk, Humayun highlights the challenge of playing a simple character, stressing the need to avoid overcomplicating it, while pointing out that a less complicated film demands a stronger screenplay. A little while later, Mahira agrees with his assessment.

“It’s sometimes easier to do drama than something that seems uncomplicated,” she tells me. “You’re still acting, but it has to feel natural, and not be ‘dramatic’ per se. Dramas can be easy — you play it up with histrionics and monologues. The fun here is staying true to an everyday girl, whether with two lines or a monologue and convincing everyone of what she’s feeling and going through.”

When I asked Mahira why doing this type of film never occurred to her before, she answered with a straightforward question: “Tell me, the last romantic comedy we did in Pakistan?” I reply, none. “That’s why,” she says.

“Actually, when you think about it, by the nature and virtue of the work we do on television, we understand drama quite well,” she adds. “This is not that. There have been comedies, there have been heavy, dramatic romances and social commentaries, but we haven’t had a romantic comedy that was made just for that reason: being a romantic comedy.”

Mahira had wanted to work on other projects, most of them intense love stories, and dramas — which, she confesses, attract her as an actor and a human being — when Nadeem convinced her to take a “leap of faith.”

“That did something to me like good dialogue does to the audience in film,” she says. “I remember telling Vasay [Chaudhry] that the beauty of his scenes and dialogues are their unpretentious simplicity, whose impact you don’t quite understand on paper. When you perform it, that is when you realise ‘Oh my God, how can this line, this small little scene, turn into this?!’” she exclaims.

Scripts, of course, are notoriously difficult to get right, but shouldn’t actors — especially those of Mahira’s celebrity stature — find writers to write good scripts for them to either star in or produce as Humayun does?

“If I could, I would,” she replies. “It’s one thing to say that, okay, we’re lazy about it, but it’s a really hard thing to do, to get people together and get a script made — it’s not easy to do that. Nobody helps you to do that. Nobody does. I did make Ek Thi Nigar and Baarwaan Khilaarri, so I put my money where my mouth is.” The fact is, she believes, one has to have a running drama production company to make films.

When I ask, bewildered, whether even Mahira Khan has problems raising money, she says she does. “If you will raise it for me, I will do it, make movies.”

Returning to the question, Mahira says that she would love to produce, and has been looking at scripts for the past few months — she doesn’t want them to be written just for her. “They can be about characters I can play, or they can be stories I can produce. It depends. I am at a place, age and time when I cannot do everything. I would love to produce a young romance, maybe even direct it.”

Muhammad Jerjees Seja, one of Love Guru’s producers, says that filmmaking is not for the faint of heart in Pakistan. “It was a risk in 2013, when inflation wasn’t as high, and it is a risk today. Filmmaking is not a business model. In the case of Love Guru, it is about rejuvenation of the industry, to inspire other producers, who have given up, to step back into the ring,” he says. “Someone has to take the step and say, there is potential and that there is hope.”

He continues: “I am not saying that we have made something extraordinary, but I do know that it is a good movie. It may not be an all-time great critically or commercially, but it will not be a disaster, because it is something we have made with a lot of passion, care and hard work,” he says. He adds that, irrespective of Love Guru’s business, ARY Films and its subsidiaries plan to start a slate of films so that cinema can make a comeback.

Before that can happen though, there is the question of getting the film to the audience. While a Pakistan-wide release poses no problems, getting the film out internationally may have now turned into a job-and-half.

Consistency is key for international distribution, according to Irfan Malik, head of ARY Films. He believes a distributor needs at least six films annually for sustained influence, a challenge Pakistan faces with its limited “export-worthy films.”

Irfan stresses that Pakistani filmmaking requires a “jihad-like” commitment, advocating for one major money-making film monthly.

Releasing a film in 15 countries is a significant hurdle, he sighs. While acknowledging Indian cinema’s role in establishing a market for Urdu films, he notes that most distribution networks are of Indian origin — and here it becomes an issue.

Irfan, however, also believes that all distributors need good films, and films that have the potential to get the audiences out of their homes, have an edge. A film that doesn’t get into politics — geo or human — that is made for people to have a good night out, that has Humayun and Mahira, may stand out.

Judging from the people’s reaction during the two stars’ international press tour, Love Guru might just be what the doctor ordered this Eid.

Love Guru releases this Eidul Azha…possibly worldwide.

Originally published in Dawn, ICON, June 1st, 2025