Many Pakistanis – particularly since the 1982 Academy Award-winning film ‘Gandhi’ – feel that their country’s founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, has been underappreciated throughout the world. Now, they want to change Jinna’s image abroad with a movie of their own.

Wealthy, mostly expatriate Pakistanis who have financed the making of Jamil Dehlavi’s film ‘Jinnah’ still have far to go before their work is done.

Although producer-director Dehlavi has finished work on the movie, ‘Jinnah’ still lacks distribution in the United States and Europe, and some people involved in the project believe time is running out to find a distributor.

Investors in Jinnah include former Prime Minister Moeen Qureshi but, as actor Richard Ashby, who portrays Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in the film, notes, “They’re just amateurs … If they’re going to find a distributor, now is the time to do it.”

More problematic is that ‘Jinnah’ – which has been subjected to months of controversy within Pakistan over its portrayal of the Westernised intellectual who pushed Pakistan’s creation – is, in many ways, a defensive work which actually suffers in comparison to ‘Gandhi.’

That British-produced film directed by Richard Attenborough, starred Ben Kingsley as Mohandas K. Gandhi. It drew scorn in Pakistan because its brief portrayal of Jinnah conformed to the Western stereotype of the leader: a humourless, ambitious aristocrat who sips wine while working to carve a Muslim state out of British India.

Dehlavi’s central character is a different man entirely: frequently witty, compassionate, loving to his wife and sister, worried about potential Hindu-Muslim violence. Portrayed by British actor Christopher Lee – who, Pakistani cynics jibed, is known mainly for playing Dracula – this Jinnah is recognisably human and laudable, while still being a shrewd and even ruthless politician.

Lee’s Jinnah – in the occasionally simplistic script written by Dehlavi and noted Jinnah scholar Akbar Ahmed – clearly is a product of British and Western training. He is seen twice reprimanding Muslim zealots about the need for women’s rights, even though he also insists that his Parsi wife Ruttie (Indira Varma) convert to Islam before their marriage.

“We wanted to show that the only man who founded a Muslim country in our century was a liberal politician and a modern intellectual,” says Dehlavi.

Yet the team behind ‘Jinnah’ have produced a portrait of Pakistan’s founder that is neither here nor there – and is equally likely to win objections from Islamists, liberals and Indians over how history is represented.

When Lee’s Jinnah stages debates on the rights of minority Muslims in a free India with Ashby’s Nehru and Sam Dastor’s Gandhi, the movie comes briefly alive with a look at the vexing questions the three leaders faced:

What would be the shape of a new India? And could Muslims fit in a democracy heavily weighted to the Hindu majority?

Those questions, unfortunately, are sidestepped. Instead, the film’s makers place considerable weight on the ridiculous idea that the sorry fate of partition and of Pakistan was heavily influenced by an affair between Nehru and Lady Edwina Mountbatten, wife of England’s last viceroy.

Rather than simply correcting the unflattering impression of Jinnah in ‘Gandhi’, Dehlavi and Ahmed show a radically different world in which Gandhi is as conniving as he is noble, and in which Nehru’s ambitions for power – not Jinnah’s – push forward the split of the subcontinent into a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim- majority Pakistan.

It is also a world, skeptical historians may note, where Hindus slaughter Muslims frequently, but Muslim atrocities are only mentioned and not shown.

Perhaps the strongest sign of the film’s defensiveness is a literal trial, conducted in a mock-afterworld, where Jinnah once again dons a lawyer’s robe to try Lord Mountbatten (effectively portrayed as an amiable dolt by James Fox) as guilty for the problems that plagued Pakistan’s birth. The loss of Kashmir, the brutality in which one million people died crossing the Indo- Pakistani border – all of that, the film suggests, is owed to the Mountbattens.

In short, ‘Jinnah’ seems to be targeted at Pakistani nationalists. Ironically, however, that community demanded dozens of changes in Dehlavi’s original film, including scenes suggesting that Pakistan’s founder regretted the state he had helped create once he saw the violence of its birth.

The final cut still shows Jinnah weeping over the deaths of partition while an uncomprehending crowd cheers him on. And there are a few remarkable moments, particularly a series of amusing exchanges between Jinnah and an angel (played by Shashi Kapoor) who must judge whether the Pakistani leader deserves a happy afterlife or not. (Muslim groups have also objected to the angel sequences.)

For the most part, however, the film fails to show what kind of state Jinnah wanted to create, and indeed makes little effort to show Pakistan at all. East Pakistan – which broke away to become Bangladesh – is not even mentioned, and there is almost no examination of the differences between India’s Congress Party and the Muslim League which Jinnah joined.

For all the effort, ‘Jinnah’ lacks a centre – and Pakistan’s founder, and his creation, remain as enigmatic at the film’s end as they have ever been. It is an unusually ambiguous movie which deserves to be seen, but it may well be one that never finds its audience.