Rated PG-13. At Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond, Methuen 20, and other suburban theaters and on VOD starting May 26.
What’s a Richard Curtis-like, “Love Actually”-ish rom-com that you know the ending of in the first five minutes got to with it? It’s not that almost infuriatingly generic pop song title also used for a serious 1993 film about the Tina Tuner-Ike Turner marriage of the same name. But, wait a minute. The cross-cultural romance “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” was directed by Shekhar Kapur of “Elizabeth” (1998) and “Elizabeth: The Golden Age” (2007) with an Academy Award-winning Cate Blanchett. What’s Kapur doing making a rom-com with Lily James of “Cinderella” and “Pam & Tommy” fame? Well, it turns out that “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” is set in part in London and Lahore, Pakistan, which was known as Lahore, British India when Kapur was born there.
The film’s title is in part a reference to arranged marriages (also known as assisted marriages) still common among Muslims and British-Muslims. As it turns out, this is all pertinent to the plot.
Meet Zoe Stevenson (James), She’s an attractive, if also somewhat confused, award-winning documentary filmmaker with an eccentric mother named Cath (Academy Award-winner Emma Thompson as comic relief) and a need to arrange for a new project with a pair of -high concept-minded producers. They’re not so hot about a film about “honor killings.” But they like a film about “assisted marriages” in modern-day Britain.
In fact, Zoe’s old friend and next door neighbor Kazim (“Bridgerton”-ready Shazad Latif, TV’s “Star Trek: Discovery”), a surgeon, is about to get married to a Pakistani woman with the “assistance” of his traditional parents Zahid (Jeff Mirza) and Aisha (Shabana Azmi). Zoe and Kazim, who hides his smoking habit from his parents, are childhood friends who shared a tree house out back.
We hear Kazim and his parents discussing terms with Mo the Matchmaker (an entertaining Asim Chaudhry), and frankly some of them sound racist: The wife-to-be must be Pakistani, not Indian, “not too dark,” a “practicing Muslim,” and one who finds a hijab sufficient. When she isn’t filming Kazim and his family in London, Zoe is commiserating with her friend Helena (Alice Orr-Ewing) whose husband has been caught having an affair with a co-worker. Zoe recites slightly altered fairy tales to Helena’s two young daughters (“glass ceilings?” “glass slippers?”). Zoe’s father left her mother for a 35-year-old. Cath loves Kazim’s family in a slightly racist kind of way. The screenplay by first-timer Jemima Khan is really quite clever about the nuances of race. Cath tries to set Zoe up with her veterinarian (Oliver Chris), not-too-successfully, although he is game.
In Lahore, Kazim’s parents find a “convent-educated,” beautiful, young woman named Maymouna (Sajal Ali). Meanwhile, Zoe is thinking about freezing her eggs and putting the whole marriage thing on the back burner. Her version of Little Red Riding Hood is definitely not for Helena’s kids. Will Kazim’s folks reconcile with the sub-plotted daughter (Mariam Haque), who ran off and married a white British man and meet their baby grandson? Will Cath stop upstaging the young people on the dance floor? (BTW screenwriter Khan – formerly Jemima Goldsmith – is the ex-wife of former cricketer and ex-Prime Minister of Pakistan Imran Khan.) I’m not making any great claims for “What’s Love Got to Do with It.” But with its widescreen lensing, beautiful lighting, nuances and wonderful cast, it’s better, nicer to look at and more savvy and diverse that most examples of the genre.
(“What’s Love Got to Do with It?” contains profanity, sexually suggestive scenes and drug use)