What’s Love Got To Do With It? (Shekhar Kapur, 2022)
What's Love Got To Do With It? is a mostly engaging romantic comedy with two likable leads, but also a story that struggles with modern identity politics.
Written by Jemima Khan and deftly directed by Shekhar Kapur (Elizabeth, Elizabeth: The Golden Age), the film is about British filmmaker Zoe (Lily James), who tries to make a documentary about the arranged, sorry, assisted marriage of her best friend Kazim (Shazad Latif), who wants to continue in the tradition of his Pakistani family and marry a Muslim woman.
Strong production values, an entertaining soundtrack by Nitin Sawhney, charming lead actors and a kooky supporting role by Emma Thompson (which, admittedly, may not be for everyone) make sure the movie is worth the theatrical experience. Still, despite its many charms, the end result feels a bit schizophrenic.
The movie wants to be both politically correct and incorrect at the same time. It wants to have its proverbial arranged wedding cake - and eat it too.
The screenplay raises questions it doesn’t have an answer for. Zoe thinks it's a bit strange that Kazim can’t find a wife by himself. That may be the case, but by trying to make her friend do better she may be suffering from white savior complex.
Conversely, Kazim points out that Zoe has a habit of always falling for the wrong man and making a mess of her love life. But who is he to be the judge of that? Some kind of anti-feminist?!
The movie blithely ignores the complications it creates, and if you can simply enjoy its paradoxical nature, that’s fine with me.
But there is a problem even the creators couldn’t ignore: is a white woman like Zoe even allowed to make a documentary about a arranged marriages, something she knows very little about? The producers of her film-within-the-film figure out quite late in the day that such 'white-lensing' is not desirable in this complicated modern age - and so the doc promptly gets cancelled.
I don’t have a clue whether it was always in the screenplay like this or whether it was some late addition in the shooting stage. But it feels incredibly awkward, making the central character of Zoe look dumber than she needs to be. She’s presented as an award winning filmmaker, so she probably could have thought of this herself.
Also, as a fly on the wall filmmaker Zoe often feels like a supporting character in her own movie.
Lily James may be the biggest name on the poster, but it is possible to imagine the movie completely without her. Instead focusing on the characters of Kazim and Maymouna (Sajal Ali), a.k.a. his future wife from Pakistan, who has quite an interesting backstory of her own. And focusing on their possibly differing opinions on assisted marriages.
At times I felt like I was watching two films at the same time, but as I am Dutch and they came at the price of one I still mostly enjoyed myself. I mean, the movie looks great, especially if you compare it to the often murky looking romcoms that go around on streamers like Netflix. And Shekhar Kapur is still a great director, even if he is more a excellent craftsman now than a true visionary as in the days of Bandit Queen (1994) or Elizabeth (1998).
And by the time the credits rolled Zoe and Kazim had finally figured out what we the audience had known for the longest time: that they didn’t need bad relationships or assisted marriages at all, because well, you know how these romcoms are supposed to end.