With the traditional white and trite rom-com formula looking increasingly tired, there is an exciting opportunity for contemporary cinema to shake things up. The search for a partner in today’s more diverse society – navigating love and marriage traditions across cultures – is ground ripe for exploration.
Unfortunately, What’s Love Got To Do With It? stumbles on that ground pretty early on and never regains its feet.
Zoe (Lily James), our mildly unlikeable protagonist, is a documentarian with terrible taste in men and a mother who is overly invested in her finding The One. Cath (Emma Thompson), Zoe’s mum, might be bitter about the brutal end of her marriage but she still believes that her little girl should be working harder to find her own happily ever after.
Until Zoe finally walks down the aisle, Cath can content herself with living vicariously through her close friends and neighbours the Khans as they celebrate a wedding in colourful style. Zoe is also delighted to be welcomed back by the Khan family, especially because it gives her a chance for a proper catch-up with her childhood friend Kazim (Shazad Latif).
Kaz’s professional life is going swimmingly and as a handsome oncologist he should have no trouble finding the perfect woman now he has decided to settle down. Yet he has decided to entrust the search to his parents and commit to an arranged – or assisted – marriage. The news comes as a shock to Zoe but she recovers as soon as the need for more upbeat subject matter makes her determine to document his quest.
Aisha (Shabana Azmi) and Zahid Khan (Jeff Mirza) are proud to be able to help their handsome son find his match. The family still bears the emotional scars of their daughter ‘marrying out’ and Kaz has handed them a chance to do things right. After a fruitless search closer to home they believe they have found everything they want in a daughter-in-law and bride in their homeland of Pakistan: the beautiful Maymouna.
Maymouna (Sajal Ali) and Kaz meet virtually for a purported one-on-one chat that ends up being rather a family affair. And within weeks he breaks it to a stunned Zoe that her film will conclude with a fairytale wedding in Lahore. Zoe likes her fairytales with a dark spin – as evidenced by the bedtime stories she tells her babysitting charges – but she swallows her doubts and packs a bag. Skillfully evading a fix-up with her mum’s hunky young vet James (Oliver Chris) on her way.
Superficially, What’s Love Got To Do With It is a fun and vibrant ride, with a healthy sprinkle of laughs, despite a few emotional bumps along the way. The entire production works admirably hard to maintain that surface sparkle but even Shabana Azmi’s charisma, Remi Adefarasin’s stunning cinematography and director Shekhar Kapur’s creativity combined cannot disguise how little lies beneath. This is a shallow, sloppy story told from the wrong person’s perspective in a pretty condescending tone.
We are led to believe that Zoe and Kaz are close friends, however, they interact more like affable colleagues thrown together for ten minutes too long on the commute home. The Khan family read as loving and flawed with the undercurrents of old resentments, intergenerational differences and overwhelming hope played with veracity. Zoe and Kaz, by contrast, feel like character profiles rather than people.
Their bond is peculiarly soulless and it means that their evolving feelings never really ring true. The focus on pouty dissatisfied Zoe is misguided, she’s the least interesting character and the *only* interesting thing about her is how she affords her houseboat. Meanwhile, Kaz’s inner life isn’t fleshed out enough to justify his sudden determination to marry and his reasons for fixing on Maymouna as his bride are never made clear.
Perhaps Kaz and Maymouna do connect in the series of offscreen conversations we are told they have shared but bookending these is the onscreen reality that Maymouna is downcast and teary when we first meet her and doesn’t alter her demeanour until she can be her true self partying with her friends. This combined with Kaz’s horrified reaction to seeing the real Maymouna can only lead us to conclude that Kaz prefers her as the traditional-presenting shadow of herself.
This not only contradicts everything we are being told about what a kind and delightful man he is but also gives the (hopefully wrong) impression that Kaz is a callous hypocrite; weirdly keener on Maymouna when she seems tearful and broken and holding her to different standards than Zoe, who he is evidently falling for. In writing What’s Love Got To Do With It? Jemima Khan apparently wanted to pen a love letter to a culture she feels fondly for. She failed.
With its tone-deaf narrative bordering on offensive, dialogue as clunky as Zoe’s twisted fairytales, Emma Thompson awkwardly cranking every moment up to eleven and such a surfeit of dangling plot threads you could weave a wedding veil, the answer to the question this film’s title poses is…nothing. Love has nothing to do with this disappointing mess.
What’s Love Got To Do With It? opens across the UK on February 24th
