Film review: What's Love Got to Do With It? offers a cross-cultural dialogue on rom-com tropes
Shabana Azmi and Emma Thompson: starring in What's Love Got To Do With It?
- What’s Love Got to Do With It?
- ★★★★☆
The random nature of love is enshrined in the romantic comedy as the meet-cute, that magical moment when our star-crossed lovers encounter one another for the very first time. (12A) eschews the meet-cute entirely, however; Kazim Khan (Shazad Latif) is a London-born Muslim who is perfectly happy for his parents Aisha (Shabana Azmi) and Zahid (Jeff Mirza) to arrange – or assist, to be precise – his marriage.
Zoe (Lily James), a documentary filmmaker and Kaz’s next-door neighbour since they were kids, is intrigued and appalled by his choice, but Kaz is a self-proclaimed proud Muslim. With assisted marriage, he explains, ‘you don’t start with love, but you end with love.’ That Zoe will film Kaz’s attempts to find himself a perfectly matched wife is a given (her documentary’s working title is ‘Love, Contractually’), but Shekhar Kapur’s film, which was written by Jemima Khan, is nowhere as predictable as rom-coms tend to be.
The usual flirtatious banter of opposites attracting is here presented as a kind of cross-cultural dialogue, as Zoe argues in favour of Western notions of romantic love (‘a dangerous mental illness,’ according to Kaz) while refusing to partake in the traditional fairytale herself – Zoe is a self-professed Cinderella who focuses on glass ceilings rather than glass slippers.
The result is a rom-com that offers more food for thought than we generally get from the genre, and especially when Maymouna (Sajal Ali), Kaz’s fiancée who lives in Pakistan, enters the picture – literally, as it happens, with their belated meet-cute happening on Zoom.
The closing scenes are rather schmaltzy by comparison with the realism of what has gone before, but this is a charming, thought-provoking film that benefits from a vibrant chemistry between Lily James and Shazad Latif, and strong support from Emma Thompson as Zoe’s mother Cath, a well-meaning but culturally insensitive neighbour to the long-suffering Khan family. (cinema release)
