There is something about Lily James’ face that makes you believe she is the same sweet, unassuming, kind and chirpy person she is on screen as she is in real life.
She has the wholesome, girl-next-door prettiness of actors including Shailene Woodley and Winona Ryder — so she’s often cast in roles that see her nourish a crush on a man who has no idea he is desired by her. This happened in the 2019 film “Yesterday”, and it happens in Shekhar Kapur’s latest film, “What’s Love Got to Do with It”.
James plays Zoe, a thirty-something documentary maker who has decided to follow her childhood friend Kaz as he embarks on an ‘assisted marriage’. At 32, Kaz is a child of Pakistani migrants and devoted to making his parents happy. He entrusts them with the responsibility of finding him a wife — a woman he says, who must be “smart, intelligent, and attractive.”
When Kaz’s parents find him a nice girl in Pakistan, he invites Zoe to tag along to the wedding in Lahore. All the while, Zoe is struggling to find ‘the right man’, cycling through a series of bad dates and finding temporary solace in one night stands.
It doesn’t help that her mother, Cath, played by Emma Thompson, is pressuring her to settle down and couple up. She even tries to get her daughter to date her tall, handsome, very available vet. But Zoe can’t seem to figure out what she’s meant to feel when she’s in a relationship. She doesn’t really know what to look for.
Is it a feeling? A compatibility? Is it intellectual? Emotional? Does there have to be sexual chemistry?
These questions are fleshed out and chewed over with Kaz, as he prepares to betroth himself to a woman he’s only met via Skype a few times.
“Is it love at first Skype?” Zoe asks Kaz. He replies, “Love at first anything is a mental health issue.”
There’s a lot of pushback on western tropes of romantic love. “Fall into like. Work into love,” Kaz’s mother instructs her son.
Interspersed through the film are Zoe’s interviews with happy couples who came together through assisted marriages (including Kaz’s parents, and his brother). These scenes are accompanied by saccharine piano tunes, though it still manages to feel genuine and heartfelt.
In the West, arranged marriages have been subjected to an extremely narrow and singular narrative — through Jemima Khan’s concise, hilarious script, the custom expands to allow us to reassess various cultural myths, and offer different versions of true love.
Fairy tales are myths too, and they gradually become more bitter as Zoe discovers a devastating truth in her sister’s marriage while spiralling into a crisis of her own — all the while, Cath is pressuring her to secure a mate so that she can have some grandchildren.
“Am I just half a person when I’m not with a man?” Zoe asks her mother, articulating the universal, exhausting and very private pain of single women around the world. The film does a brilliant job at balancing our sympathises between the yearning of a mother who wants to see her daughter in a loving relationship, and a young woman who simply cannot find this.
When Zoe visits an egg-freezing clinic to discuss her options, the woman at the clinic asks Zoe if she wants ultimately to be a mother.
“I’d rather be a father,” Zoe jokes. Don’t we all?
Romcoms are a dying breed, because previous impediments for two people to get together (distance, communication, identity, technology) are no longer credible sources for keeping them apart. But this film isn’t interested in whether or not Zoe and Kaz find love with each other. It is a study of marriage, and how we come to love those we commit ourselves to.
It’s also a huge tear-jerker. I counted five times throughout this film where I ugly-cried big, enormous tears. As a child of migrants myself, I was glad to see a film that doesn’t condescend ‘the other’ culture, and dignifies every iteration of love, whatever that may be.