THE FUSE

The opening credits of “No Good Men” play out over a profuse montage of cactus flowers blooming in rapid time-lapse abundance, their pastel petals billowing brightly over the plant’s thorny armor — set to an earwormy Pashtun-pop banger by Pakistani singer Nazia Iqbal. Rife with symbolic implications of beauty enduring against arid odds, the sequence is a deceptively fizzy sugar rush on which to begin a film that swings in tone from droll to somber throughout, without ever matching that initial exuberant peak. But this inconsistency is the point of an unusual, disarming third feature from Afghan writer-director-star Shahrbanoo Sadat, which repeatedly pits buoyant romantic comedy tropes against devastating crashes of realism.