Even if one doesn’t agree with the jigsaw puzzle design aesthetics of Money Back Guarantee’s (MBG) posters, one cannot deny the subliminal parallel one sees between them and the film’s press plan.

Piecing together the information has been very much like a whodunnit mystery — except, in the posters, enough jigsaw pieces are locked together that one can understand who the characters are in the extensive ensemble cast.

Call it the will and whim of writer-director Faisal Qureshi, the lid has been sealed shut since 2020, when MBG wrapped shooting. Imagine the toll this has taken on the actors — most of whom have also been kept secret from the press.

Why the silent treatment? Surely a film on a bank heist leaves little to ponder in the mystery department. Or does it?

Eid release Money Back Guarantee is meant to be a relatable political satire set in a fi ctional country.But also an all-out entertainer with a massive cast. And writer-director Faisal Qureshi doesn’t want anybody to talk too much, for fear of giving away the plot. Will it live up to its hype?

At a couch in a house in DHA, Karachi, this writer is shown bits and pieces of the film on MBG’s producer and actor Shayan Khan’s phone. What I saw blew my mind.

Shayan’s phone ran a completely different film than the ineffectually cut trailer (the teaser was far better): there’s vibrant colour, dumbfounding wit and twirling dance choreography on display.

I turned and gave Ayesha Omer, one of the MBG actresses, a stunned, raised eyebrow look, and a what-can-I-say look pinged back from her.

Ayesha plays Meena Begum — and save for the fact that she has a brief but integral role in the plot — there is little one can say about the character without giving it away.

The song I saw is probably the wittiest, foot-tapping number of this year. According to Faisal, the song — and others — will debut when the film hits cinemas on Eid-ul-Fitr.

Kiran Malik, returning late night from a serial’s shoot, tells Icon that Sanam Baloch, her character, is pretty bindaas (spirited). “She is very passionate, struggles with day-to-day life, is in debt, and as a consequence, is in a hurry to make money. She also considers herself a poetess and an intellectual — whether people are impressed by what she says, well, that’s a different matter,” she says.

Apparently, Faisal wants to continue MBG’s masquerade of a slick and swift, adrenaline-packed Hollywood-ish production until its release. And the added surprise revelations of the songs will be a bonus, he asserts.

However, what to tell becomes a big issue.

The issue may have led to quite a few internal debates that compelled Fawad Khan, one of the actors in the film, and Faisal to do a witty promotional video a few days ago. In the video, the two duked it off because the director had restrained the actor from divulging anything.

As it turns out, getting Fawad’s two cents on the film really is quite a challenge. The actor was approached continuously over the last few weeks to no avail. The video, mentioned above, was made but no phone calls happened.

Coming back to the movie: MBG is a political satire set in a world that’s not really Pakistan — yet it very well could be.

The cast of robbers are made up of Irfan Pathan (Mikaal Zulfiqar), Ilyas Kashmiri (Shayan Khan), Nawaz Sindhi (Gohar Rasheed), G.A. Muhajir (Mani), Munda Punjabi (Marhoom Bilal), Christian Bale (Afzal ‘Jan Rambo’ Khan) and Sanam Baloch (Kiran Malik).

The expanded cast includes Ayesha Omer, Javed Sheikh, Hina Dilpazeer, Adnan Jaafar, Ali Safina, Ali Rehman Khan (some of them have cameo-ish parts), Waseem and Shaniera Akram, and of course how can one forget Fawad Khan, playing what is probably the wildest character one can fathom from the actor.

But who are these people, and given the plot and the genre, what’s at stake?

Kiran Malik, returning late night from a serial’s shoot, tells Icon that Sanam Baloch, her character, is pretty bindaas (spirited). “She is very passionate, struggles with day-to-day life, is in debt, and as a consequence, is in a hurry to make money. She also considers herself a poetess and an intellectual — whether people are impressed by what she says, well, that’s a different matter,” she says.

The star of Zarrar and Pinky Memsaab says that the script wooed her (a recurring line from every cast member).

“The wit is very technical,” she says and one that had given her a few sleepless nights, I gather from our conversation.

Kiran plays a woman in a predominantly male gang. Kiran also hasn’t done comedy before, so concerns managed to find their way in.

“There are so many big, refined actors and I am still a newcomer. Concerns got [the better of me] because I was thinking that way. But then I said to myself, I’ve been offered a role, and I need to show that I can do this.”

For Sanam, Kiran had to adopt a certain accent, she tells me, which was a challenge.

“The hardest thing was the accent. I was slightly unsure at times, whether I was doing it right,” Mikaal Zulfiqar confirms a few nights later on the phone.

“There’s this habit I have as an actor, that when I do anything, I do it with confidence,” Mikaal continues. “I think I have to believe it first, and if I believe it then I can make it believable.

“The Pathan [Pakhtun] accent or my version of one,” he laughs, “was more of a [concern] than the performance,” he says.

“Usually, accents [or other intricate nuances of performances] take three or four days to seep into me. By the mid of the shoot, the nuance becomes pakka [firm]. Towards the end, the accent became easy and now that character is still in me somewhere,” he tells me, shifting impromptu into a Pakhtun-ish Urdu accent. This innocent caricature was worth a laugh-and-a-half.

Mikaal is one of the producers of the film along with Shayan. They had previously partnered as producers on Na Band Na Baraati (NBNB) — a Hum Films and Eveready Pictures release that bombed domestically during its 2018 Eid-ul-Fitr run (according to unverifiable reports, NBNB made good money internationally).

Mikaal says that he saw a burning passion in Shayan during NBNB’s filming. “I saw him picking up garbage, driving the equipment truck. These things show your passion and commitment, and that’s when I decided that this is the partner I want to work with.”

“[At the end of that film], I made him a promise that I will get him a project that would be a success,” Mikaal says.

MBG was a good, ready-to-go package, he says, because Faisal had really done his homework. There were piles of it, in fact, so there was very little to do, when it came to prepping the production.

Given the political satire nature of the film, the story is complicated, but it is accessible as well, Mikaal says — an aspect of the film Gohar Rasheed explains well, when the actor and I talk one night later.

“MBG is so valid, so relatable. The changes the characters desire are the very changes that I want around me,” Gohar says.

“Nawaz Sindhi’s demand and prerogative is that he wants clean water for himself, and that he wants his rights and his tax money to be utilised the right way.”

“The country the film is set in is fictitious but, at the same time, we are talking about problems that you can find in Pakistan,” he stresses.

One of the other appeals of the film comes from two names one couldn’t imagine being a part of movies: Waseem and Shaniera Akram.

Taking time out from their family vacation in Brighton, Australia, Shaniera tells me over the phone that, at this juncture, I might know more about the film than her.

“It’s very awkward, when you’re calling to interview about the movie, and one can’t say anything about it,” she confesses with a bright laugh.

Shaniera plays a journalist who finds out that everything is not quite as it should be, she says.

“I give another perspective to the movie,” she says about her character, whom she doesn’t name. “It’s an outside perspective, because all of this chaos is going around, and you have to keep your eyes open because something cheeky is happening here, or something serious is happening over there.

“Waseem has been asked to do a couple of movies since I’ve been married to him. We sat down and had a discussion about [MBG], and we just thought it was something fun to do together, so we decided to do it.”

Interjecting Shaniera, Waseem Akram says that Faisal approached him to play a pivotal character with the most cliched of lines: “When Faisal approached me, he told me ‘I have a role for you’ and I said ‘Yeh tau barri filmi baat ki hai tu ne yaar [that’s a very film-y line],” the celebrated cricket icon says.

“I told Faisal I don’t have time to read the whole script, so he told me this one line,” he says, and that was all it took to get the former cricketer onboard.

Faisal and Waseem had previously worked on several commercials together, so the familiarity was there.

“It was good fun,” Waseem says. “Kudos to the actors, because it’s not that easy to make a movie or drama — you have to remember every line, and then, on top of that, you have to act,” he says. “In commercials, you have to deliver one line, and you can do it 30 times, again and again, until you get it right.”

“I don’t know what the acting bug is,” Shaniera says, answering another one of my questions.

“One day Kiran Malik and I were chatting and she told me that making a movie is one thing, but once you see yourself on the big screen, and something happens to you, then acting is for you — so I have to wait and see.”

“I am not bothered at my tender age,” Waseem adds.

The two are quite fun to talk to, one realises.

“I can understand Urdu, but sometimes people were talking too fast for my understanding,” Shaniera says, when we talk about her experience on the set. “There were things happening in the room that I didn’t know were going to happen in the film.”

The husband-wife duo spent nine days on the shoot, and then left, so they have little idea of how the film actually turned out.

Waseem says that the film will set a benchmark for Pakistani cinema, but the long road from its production to release had the veteran cricketer worried.

Faisal, however, wasn’t that worried about the delays.

“The real Money Back Guarantee is that people will enjoy the film more the second time round. The story has real life, relatable characters,” Faisal says as we walk into his dimly lit editing room, where the computers are connected to a huge screen.

Faisal felt it was just better if he showed me a good chunk of the movie in response to my queries. Some 20 minutes later, I understood the director’s and the cast’s dilemma. There is just too much happening in the film —in a good way — and at the same time, talking about even one aspect would spoil the experience. The film is delicately, and deliberately, manufactured to be wholesome, complicated, relevant and witty.

From what I understand, the Pakhtun wants respect, the Sindhi wants water, the Baloch wants gas, the Muhajir wants a white-collar job, the Christian wants his minority rights, and the Punjabi…well, let’s leave that bit of detail until the review.

“I haven’t spoken to any intellectual on what these people actually want. I went on the grassroots level and I spoke to the people who lived there,” Faisal tells me.

The director had written the script in late 2018. “I run away from writing scripts but I didn’t have any choice.” The effort of getting a writer to write according to his mindset was just too much of a hassle, the director sighs.

“I thought up the idea in a day, laid the structure in another day, and wrote it within two months. I didn’t take any advice, because people’s opinions deviated from my ideology,” he tells me.

This penchant for following his creative vision also led him to do most of the film’s paperwork.

“Since I didn’t have a financier and I didn’t have any money to give to anyone, so again, I had little option but to do everything myself. I love architecture and interior design, so I hired two architects to draft the layout of the production design,” he says.

Unfortunately, despite his extensive experience of directing commercials, investors kept him hooked, but didn’t commit. That was when he was introduced to Shayan by Mikaal — a young producer who was interested in the movie business as an actor and producer.

Shayan — who also fits the bill when it came to casting Ilyas Kashmiri’s character — had been working on Zashko Films (his production banner and international studio). Learning the creative and business pitfalls the hard way after NBNB bombed, Shayan tells Icon that MBG will have a worldwide release on 800 screens — a number that trumps The Legend of Maula Jatt.

With Shayan and Mikaal’s support, MBG went into production with lighting fast speed — the pace people associate with Faisal’s direction (he shoots very fast, I’m told).

By the time the film hit the sets, the shooting schedule was finalised for an intense, well-planned 42 days.

Faisal tells me that he wants to run away from writing movies. He is more of an executioner with a commando-like attitude and a penchant for complicated camera moves. These aspects — and the experience from MBG — will continue to fuel Faisal’s intense desire to make movies, I understand. He’s already working on two at the moment.

At a time when film production in Pakistan is facing an all-time low, Shayan and Faisal — two individuals with a will to push boundaries and do things differently — may very well be what Pakistani cinema needs.

Money Back Guarantee releases in cinemas this Eid-ul-Fitr

Published in Dawn, ICON, April 16th, 2023