Set in Pakistan in the late 80s, this drama tells the tale of an all-purpose Western couple - politically connected American-Jewish wife Melissa Leo and environmentally-active British atheist husband James Wilby - who seek a cure for their infertility by spending time at a Pakistani shrine run by Islamic eunuchs, where their problems are dealt with by prayer, incense, chanting, ritual drunkenness, lots of sex and, if all else fails, the provision of a non-eunuch temple-boy as sex surrogate for the wife.
Throw in a camp British crook who smuggles stolen Korans, Wilby's affair with a photographer, the unfolding drama of the fatwah on Salman Rushdie, more infodump on the country's culture and politics, and what you have is a film that is, to say the least, rather hard to believe. Director Dehlavi began this as a documentary about shrines in Pakistan and then had all the ideas that jelled into making it a fiction feature, though this delving into the strange world of Islamic eunuchs has been somewhat pre-empted by a BBC documentary which proved more alarming than anything here - apart from one stomach-turning moment when a eunuch shoves a snake into his nose and out of his mouth with one movement.