What’s love got to do with it? You may be unsurprised to learn that a romantic comedy that poses such a question upfront will also answer it… and that the answer will turn out to be exactly what you suspect it will.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, of course, that a lighthearted movie about romance with, at its center, two appealing and charismatic people — who are definitely not a couple in spite of their obvious attraction to each other — not only will inevitably fail to surprise you, but that the lack of surprise is a feature, not a bug. These movies are built around a Will they?/Won’t they? pseudosuspense that dare not overtly concede the certainty of a happily-ever-after, yet also dare not deny the audience such an ending.
The only question, then, with a movie like What’s Love Got to Do with It? is this: Do we care? Do we like these people enough to get swept up in their temporary troubles, to join them in their obliviousness to the perfect-for-them person right in front of them until they overcome that big ol’ blind spot?
And the answer to that question in this case is this: Absolutely. The congenial 30something Londoner not-couple here are Zoe (Lily James: Yesterday, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society), a documentary filmmaker whose love life is a bit of a mess but she’s happy being single anyway, and her childhood friend Kazim (Shazad Latif: The Commuter, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel), a doctor who is letting his Pakistani-immigrant parents find him a bride. Perhaps the best measure of a romantic comedy is whether you like the destined-for-each-other partners not only when they are sparking off each other but also when they’re not even in the same scene. Zoe and Kazim? They are delightful together and separately. This is an experience in the true movie-movie tradition in which you don’t even care what the beautiful charming people onscreen are doing, as long as you get to spend time with them.
There’s plenty besides to recommend Love, however. It’s a more diverse London than we usually see in mainstream films here — though that’s beginning to change; see also the just released Polite Society (in theaters on both sides of the Atlantic) and Rye Lane (on Hulu in the US, Disney+ in the UK) — and it’s a companionable multiculturalism on display, one that recognizes that much more unites us across religious and ethnic lines than divides us. It’s not an arranged marriage that Kazim has agreed to, Zoe learns once she gets past the surprise at Kazim’s announcement, but an “assisted” one: it’s about getting some help meeting other marriage-minded people, definitely not about forcing anyone to do anything. We all know that it’s tough to meet someone special no matter how you go about it. Zoe certainly does.
Not that the film downplays the bigotry that still exists even in liberal London: “There’s an entire continent,” Kazim informs Zoe, “between number 49 and 47,” that is, their family homes on the street they share. But mostly there’s lots of cheerful cultural melting pot: Kazim’s just-married brother, Farooq (Mim Shaikh), met his new wife, Yasmin (Iman Boujelouah), when they bonded over a discussion of how Islamic ideals are reflected in Harry Potter. The film’s depiction of Zoe’s casually racist mom, Cath, might be seen as a downplaying of bigotry as something goofily endearing, especially since she’s played by the goofily endearing Emma Thompson (Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, Last Christmas), but she is more a rather accurate portrait of offhand, almost performative narrowmindedness that is more tolerant than it realizes. That sounds unfortunate, but maybe it’s hopeful? Like, maybe, scratch the surface of some racists, and there’s actually a decent person to found underneath and coaxed out? (Kazim’s mom, Aisha [Shabana Azmi: Midnight’s Children, Earth], has her own biases, too.)
Is What’s Love Got to Do with It? a slice of Asian experience through Zoe’s white lens? A bit… though scriptwriter Jemima Khan — a journalist and film producer making her feature-screenplay debut — does sneak in a joke about that, one that is, in fact, self-deprecating: her surname is by a former marriage; she’s a white British aristocrat and socialite, and she’s very aware of the optics of someone like her (or Zoe) telling this story. But director Shekhar Kapur — in a departure from his previous films, such as the sweeping historic epics Elizabeth and Elizabeth: The Golden Age, with Cate Blanchett as the 16th-century queen — brings grounded authenticity to a tale that is, ultimately, about navigating old and deeply valued traditions through the modern world. Kapur shepherds Love to where it’s going gently, with genuine smarts and real sentiment.
more films like this:
• A Simple Wedding [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV US | Apple TV UK]
• Bride & Prejudice [Prime US | Apple TV | BFI Player UK]
