What’s Love Got To Do With It? review: Lily James in a well-meaning but misguided rom-com
Culture-clash tale about a British-Pakistani arranged marriage turns into the hapless story of a white filmmaker's sad love life
Film Reviews Lily James
From My Big Fat Greek Wedding to Bride & Prejudice to the recent Netflix comedy You People, culture clashes are a romcom staple, the perfect recipe for built-in tension and contrasting aesthetics, and the jumping off point for misunderstandings and hijinks. The latest romantic comedy to tackle culture clashes—though in a much more substantial and direct way—is director Shekhar Kapoor’s What’s Love Got To Do With It, written and produced by Jemima Khan, who’s also known for producing excellent documentaries like We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks. Though the film undoubtedly raises a number of intriguing questions about the tradition of arranged marriages in a dating app world, it fails to live up to its potential, instead ending up charmless and at times even tone-deaf.
Starring Lily James and Shazad Latif, What’s Love Got to Do With It follows Zoe (James), an award-winning documentary filmmaker who’s unlucky in love and fresh out of ideas for her next film. After learning that her childhood best friend Kaz (Latif) has agreed to let his Pakistani parents find him a bride, Zoe decides Kaz and his bride-to-be (Sajal Aly) are the perfect subjects for her next documentary. But as the wedding day grows nearer, cracks begin to show in what Zoe thought would be a cut-and-dried story, and her own romantic history threatens to ruin the lives of Kaz and his family.
The idea at the core of What’s Love Got to Do With It is rock-solid. Early on, the film explicitly highlights the hypocrisy of Westerners turning their nose up at the idea of an arranged marriage when nearly half of all marriages in the U.K. end in divorce. A film earnestly exploring someone’s contrasting desire to honor their cultural heritage while reconciling their own modern attitudes about romance is compelling on its own.
But where What’s Love fails is in framing the story not as a tale of Kaz’s deeply personal dilemma, but as a portrait of Zoe’s professional struggles and her inability to find love. Between Zoe’s use of banal Disney princess metaphors (she tells her young charges about Cinderella “breaking glass ceilings instead of glass slippers”), her repeated bouts of self-pity and her complaints that she can’t find a man, she’s also remarkably unlikable. She’s a poor friend who’s constantly making the wrong ethical decisions and meddling with the lives of Kaz and his family. She harbors her own romantic feelings for Kaz but is unable to reconcile her personal beliefs about arranged marriage, continually pestering him to explain why he’s put up a “burka around [his] whole identity.”
Even more frustrating is that Zoe is contrasted by other hapless white characters who are explicitly intended to be prejudiced or insensitive: her eccentric mother Cath (Emma Thompson) serves as the film’s comic relief, twirling messily in choreographed Lollywood dance numbers and exclaiming that Pakistani weddings are “wonderfully exotic” because they make her feel like a “glorious concubine.” Granted, Cath does have a very endearing friendship with Kaz’s mother Aisha (Shabana Azmi). Their dynamic is a charming and familiar one that makes effective use of their contrasting cultural norms but also their similar personalities and devotion to their children. At the same time, Cath is that familiar archetype: the older parent or relative whose prejudices we’re meant to shrug off as an “age thing” and simply laugh at disbelievingly.
What’s Love Got to Do With It finds its most effective and moving moments when it spends time with Kaz and his family: his initially curt, borderline standoffish wife (Aly) is a wonderfully complex character who reveals her own clashing set of desires. The film is at its best when exploring the messy, undeniable emotions that contribute to taking part in an arranged marriage. And it does so with earnestness and compassion.
Tragically, these moments are few and far between, and the ones we do get are warped into moments of triumph for Zoe, the savior who has made reconciliation possible thanks to her filmmaking. Kaz and his family are more case studies than full-fledged characters like Zoe, and the film suffers for it.
In some respects, the dreariness of the tone is a testament to how effective this concept might’ve worked as a drama—it’s easy to forget it’s meant to be a romantic comedy. Zoe and Kaz are both angsty, self-involved leads who spend most of the film pining and feuding in indecision, not quite right for comic hijinks, but also not passionate or intimate enough to create interesting sparks. James and Latif are both talented, but the tepid script and the film’s bizarre tone crush any possibility of chemistry.
Though it sets out with noble intentions, What’s Love Got to Do With It is inelegant and reductive. It’s a well-meaning but misguided film that ends up playing into the same prejudices and preconceptions its characters are meant to be challenging. The lack of chemistry between its leads and its struggles with pacing and tone render this would-be romcom absent of both “rom” and “com.”
What’s Love Got To Do With It arrives in theaters May 5
38 Comments
He doesn’t look like Ike Turner.
Right? Isn’t there all ready a pretty iconic movie with this name?
What’s Originality Got To Do With It?
What’s Love Got To Do With It (Not That One)
Reealllllly wish they stopped reusing titles. How hard is it to think up an original one?
There are a lot of unrelated movies with the same name. Like Serenity (2005), the Firefly movie, and Serenity (2019) the Mathew McConaughey film noir/VR movie.
That’s Klingon plastic surgery for you.
Yes I will marry you Clem Fandango.
I know British actors are legally obligated not to turn down work but that part does not seem worthy of Emma Thompson & also pretty offensive
And critics are always like “[Beloved British actor] does their best to elevate the material” instead of “[Beloved British actor] willingly stars in yet another dogshit movie to pay for an addition on their winter home in Portugal.”They’re making some real stinkers over in Old Blighty.
Having seen the movie I’d say the part is a fairly on the nose portrayal of what I’d describe as a sort of standard middle class British racist. Unlike the reviewer I didn’t believe that I was expected to brush them off disbelievingly, but rather go, “Oh, yes, I know them…” Thompson plays her pretty much as Emma Thompson, if she were also a well meaning racist.
(For what it’s worth I largely agree with the rest of the review. It becomes the very thing it’s trying not to be. For a better attempt at subverting the standard British Asian template I recommend “Polite Society” – which is an incredibly messy, scrappy little film, but brilliant none the less.)
Is this the new trend? Rachel Leigh Cook’s A Tourist’s Guide To Love instantly comes to mind because (superficially) it also involves a pretty white woman hanging out overseas and falling in love with a not-white hunky hunk. Is this a new escapist fantasy? Should I actually be thrilled that this escapist trend now features a gender switch and Asians and South Asians are now portrayed as hunky?Eh, probably won’t watch it anyway.
Two Tickets to Paradise also did this.
Ryan Paevey is such a good-looking man. But I will say about that movie that while he is a non-white hunky hunk, or at least only half-white, he is just a regular American dude from her hometown, not someone of the culture where they are hanging out.
Ah, you’re right. I clearly didn’t read the entirety of the article. Damn fool.
Well I’ve outed myself as someone who watches Hallmark movies, so perhaps more fool I. lol
Oh my gosh, I’m sorry. I meant Tickets to Paradise with Julia Roberts and George Clooney. Their daughter in the movie marries a Balinese man.I’m old and watch old people movies.
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh well that solves that. George Clooney is also a very good looking man, too, though. Funny the guy in your movie is Balinese, since Ryan Paevey (from the Hallmark movie) is half-Indonesian. Full-circle moment.
How Lilly-White Got Her Groove Back
“when nearly half of all marriages in the U.K. end in divorce”Boy, there’s a lot to unpack in that statement, and the implication that arranged marriage is automatically better because the divorce rates are lower in cultures that use it. (Assuming that that’s actually even true, and not a cherry-picked or misleading statistic.)One, maybe divorce is more heavily stigmatized and/or harder to accomplish in cultures with arranged marriage than in the UK. A culture that outlaws divorce would certainly have low divorce rates, but that’s not a sign that their marriage culture is healthier.
Two, who says that a marriage that only ends with the death of a spouse is better? People stay in unhappy marriages all the time, when they’d be better off cutting their losses and moving on. The notion that “marriage must be permanent or You Have Failed And Should Feel Shame” is pretty goddamn antiquated.
FYI, the divorce statistic is cherry picked.Yeah the divorce rate is like 50% but, it’s skewed by people with multiple divorces. The divorce rate amongst first marriages is generally lower.
Its also based on a fallacy to begin with. It counts the amount of marriages in a year and amount of divorces in a year, except the people getting divorced in that year most likley didn’t get married in that year. The true rate I think is about 15%-30%. From an insider article “Based on that same data, about 70% of marriages from the 1990s reached 15 years, for a divorce rate of about 30%. And through around 2014 (which is when the dataset ended), the divorce rate for people who married in the 2000s was only at 15%.”
Agreed. “Don’t decide for yourself or you might make a mistake” is certainly an odd take.
People don’t get married with the intention of getting divorced and would prefer to avoid it. It can definitely be argued that getting married and then divorced is often superior to not marrying at all or remaining in a bad marriage, but there’s nothing strange about regarding a high divorce rate as a negative (even if one also believes in an Umeshism* about an excessively low divorce rate indicating too many bad marriages are persisting).* https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=40
It’s a real fact that divorce rates went up in countries like the US as soon as it became easier for women to get divorces in the 1970s. Before then it was very hard to get a divorce unless you could prove your husband was beating you or cheating on you. Just saying “I am not happy in my marriage” wasn’t enough before no-fault divorces.
I would think it was easier for both men & women, though my understanding is women initiate most divorces.
You all know darn well that sentence is implying. Its not of the garbage you decided to read it into. Its the go sweep around your own door metaphor. Trying to push the western version of marriage is bit hilarious when its been proven to be consistently not great for many.And speaking of stats, they don’t include people that would get divorced if they could afford it. Merging two incomes, especially with kids, often means staying married even if do not want too. Could go on all day why that 50% is not the exaggeration you want it to be. If I was a psychologist would be asking “why do you read so much into this and why do you care if the marriage stat is accurate?”
If I was a psychologist I’d ask why you’re so angry about this.
Logically, the idea that someone gets to choose who they marry is better than being ordered to marry someone for the same reasons democracy is better than dictatorship. BTW, the former isn’t really “Western” marriage. Arranged marriages are very much a part of Western culture, particularly among the nobility.
Exactly. The idea of arranged marriages arose from the time when women were property and a father had the right to “give” his daughter to someone, often the son of a person whom the father wanted to do business with (or even the person himself despite the age difference). And typically the woman had no mechanism of refusal or getting a divorce of her own accord. Yes, today it can be cast in a nicer light as some sort of time-saving service for busy professionals (both men and women) with no time to spend on the dating scene, and the women (except in places like Afghanistan) have the right to refuse, but it has deeply icky roots.
Yes, I can hear you, Clem Fandango.
Yes I can hear you Clem Fandango
I’m genuinely surprised Clem Fandango isn’t already married to Danny…
I have no idea who Clem Fandango is, but Grim Fandango is an excellent video game (from the 1990s, but there was a remaster about a decade ago).
I remember having the demo of that on a CD that came with Chip Magazine. (Never installed it though.)
“reductive”Classic AVC.
Is Lily James a nepo baby? I can’t understand how her lack of charasma with everyone, keeps landing her big jobs. Though I guess even a hard working agent can’t keep it up forever