What’s Love Got to Do With It?

Zoe (Mam­ma Mia dar­ling Lily James), a doc­u­men­tary film-mak­er, is look­ing for her next project and is met with a wave of unen­thu­si­asm from her investors. Sud­den­ly, her neigh­bour Kaz­im (Shaz­ad Latif) announces he is get­ting his par­ents to find a wife for him. As a suc­cess­ful doc­tor, a catch uni­ver­sal­ly acknowl­edged by any mosque match-mak­er, his will­ing­ness to take the plunge and mar­ry a woman with whom he has only video called and exchanged an awk­ward con­ver­sa­tion, is jarring.

Yet the stars align for Zoe: she has a new project, and she has an excuse to probe the alien con­cept of ​“assist­ed mar­riage” as they call it these days. As some­one who always picks wrong’uns, the lens turns both ways, and Kaz­im ques­tions her inabil­i­ty to com­mit as much as she ques­tions his eager­ness to do so.

Though this con­trast of dat­ing apps and dowries is well-inten­tioned, and the bur­geon­ing chem­istry between the stars is sweet, the script is too basic to account for their equal­ly irra­tional approach­es to love. Roman­tic come­dies are meant to be cringe‑y and based on moral­ly ques­tion­able conun­drums, but James and Latif’s indi­vid­ual charms and dynam­ic is undone by the way their char­ac­ters’ choic­es make them feel lost in a way that is com­plete­ly unre­lat­able. Cou­pled with the way the ex-Dis­ney princess frames all her dat­ing exploits as failed fairy tales for her friend’s daugh­ters, the script ends up lit­tered with clichés and confusion.

In a leap from the grumpy immi­grant moth­er in Last Christ­mas, Emma Thomp­son becomes an out-of-touch par­ent, becom­ing the über-awk­ward Brit embrac­ing mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism. It wears a lit­tle thin but echoes the best parts of Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It Like Beck­ham, and though sil­ly, brings an appre­ci­a­tion for the future of the old­er gen­er­a­tion doing their best to try new things. One shin­ing aspect of the ensem­ble is Pak­iza Baig, who plays the grand­moth­er who brings hilar­i­ty and soul to the fam­i­ly with her unfil­tered Urdu opinions.

Assist­ed mar­riage is a mine­field, one that by the nature of its lack of pri­va­cy leads to polarised suc­cess or implo­sion. In this sto­ry, for exam­ple, Kazim’s broth­er Amir has an adorable mar­riage with his wife. But it is obvi­ous that, aside from the fact their par­ents knew each oth­er, Amir and his wife share com­mon ground and inter­ests, so it feels almost insult­ing to com­pare it to his broth­er sim­ply ship­ping a gor­geous girl from Pak­istan (Sajal Ali) and just hop­ing he’ll make it work. The film does ref­er­ence When Har­ry Met Sal­ly to show how that rela­tion­ship, and that of Kazim’s par­ents are love­ly, but it does feel like an insult to the cul­ture to choose such an obvi­ous­ly doomed rela­tion­ship as a way to cen­tre the practice.

Attempt­ing a cross-over between the awk­ward idio­syn­crasies of Richard Cur­tis’ ide­al­is­tic upper mid­dle class Lon­don­ers with South Asian sec­ond-cul­ture kids, What’s Love Got To Do With It is a new take on the girl and a guy next door. Alas, even with the lega­cy of a genre known for for­giv­ing dubi­ous premis­es, it doesn’t hold up under the weight of logic.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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