At the beginning of "What's Love Got to Do With It?", enterprising London filmmaker Zoe (Lily James) pitches a proposed documentary about arranged Muslim marriages to a pair of white male commissioners. They're bored and tuned out until they realize how the subject matter can be dressed up in Western rom-com tropes and slang to appeal to a general British audience: one suggests "When Harry Met Sally"-style interview inserts ", the other mentions “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” as a point of reference. When Zoe suggests title the document "Love Contractually," the deal is done.
Sharper than anything else in Shekhar Kapur's likeable, laid-back comedy, the scene neatly satirizes how nuanced cross-cultural material can be blandly packaged and whitewashed for the mainstream, a point that would be more difficult if "What does it have to do?" see love with that?" he did not proceed to do nearly the same. With a nudge, I could credit the film with some meta self-awareness as it tackles a thorny and divisive cultural institution in the sweetest, lightest possible terms, right down to his own recurring inserts a la "When Harry Met Sally." But for what purpose, exactly? Despite the film's strenuous professing to give arranged marriages a fair chance, its entire silly narrative is rigged against the very concept: “Love by contract” may be the tone, but “Love in reality” is the preferred outcome.
Director: Shekhar Kapur
Writer: Jemima Khan
Stars: Mim Shaikh, Iman Boujelouah, Lily James
Not that Zoe herself is entering the process with a completely open mind. The spur to his documentary is the unexpected announcement by his childhood neighbor and lifelong best friend, Kazim (Shazad Latif), that he is about to enter into an arranged marriage, at the behest of his Pakistani immigrant parents, faithful to the tradition. It is, in many ways, a surprise. A handsome, courteous, and eminently quotable doctor, Kazim doesn't seem like one who would have trouble finding a partner on his own terms; As a fully assimilated British soccer player who smokes and drinks behind his parents' back, he doesn't seem particularly committed to his cultural values either.
To some extent, these are the factors on Zoe's mind when she asks Kazim, somewhat critically, why she plans to marry a stranger. But more compellingly, it only takes one scene of them cutely joking around to deduce that they're crazy about each other, have been for years and have never admitted it out loud, even when they've been unlucky in love until well into life. thirty why not? Well, there wouldn't be a story to tell if they had. And then, "What does love have to do with it?" He proceeds to confront two sets of traditions, those of Muslim marriage and those of the rom-com book, as Kazim travels to Lahore to meet and marry his approved bride, with Zoe and her camera in tow.
But it is not a fair fight, nor especially tense. Kazim's fiancée, Maymouna (Sajal Ali, in the film's most astute performance) is young, educated and ravishingly beautiful, but it takes just one Skype call to establish that they have no chemistry and no common ground, even in more ways. than they initially perceive. We don't want them to end up together any more than we want Zoe to settle for James (a sweetly embarrassed Oliver Chris), the kind but terminally shy vet that her nosy mom Cath (Emma Thompson) keeps pushing. James and Latif, both sanely attractive, don't exactly burn the screen either, but they fit the bill, in the rom-com language the film mostly speaks.
Khan, once famously married to Pakistani cricketer and eventual Prime Minister Imran Khan, infuses proceedings with a perceptive and clearly candid knowledge of the tensions and compromises that come with mixing British and Pakistani culture, as Kazim chides reasonably to Zoe for judging his family's traditions according to his own life experience, oblivious to the ways he has always been treated as another in his own home country. (Later, Zoe's documentary stalls when the producers object to the "white lens" she brings to the proceedings—again, whether Khan is calling herself on this front is questionable.) Thompson's high-profile comedic turn as Cath, meanwhile, represents the most embarrassing ways Brits can condescend to their immigrant neighbors while professing to embrace them: "Wasn't that wonderfully exotic? I feel like a concubine," she says. gushing after attending a Muslim wedding celebration.
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