Well, THAT was quick. A year after Australian rom-com Five Blind Dates debuted on Amazon Prime Video, its remake, Picture This, debuted on the very same service. The streaming era sure is inspiring in its relentless pursuit of creative diversity, isn’t it? I mean, both are even English-language films. To be fair, the original was about Chinese-Australian people and the new one is set within the British-Indian culture, so the accoutrements are different. But the premise is the same – unlucky-in-love female protagonist is prophesied to find her lifemate among the next five men she dates. The question here isn’t whether Picture This can top its predecessor, but if it can transcend the all-too-familiar tropes of the classic rom-com.
The Gist: Pia (Bridgerton’s Simone Ashley) does not have her shit together, and if she did, she obviously wouldn’t be the protagonist of a romantic comedy. She quickly wraps up a photo shoot, slops coffee all over herself, hastily improvises an ill-advised clothing change and rushes out to the bus and ends up flumping on one flip-flop to the bank to meet her mother Laxmi (Sindhu Vee) and younger sister Sonal (Anoushka Chadha). Laxmi has gathered her daughters around a safe-deposit box full of valuable jewelry. Sonal will get some for her pending wedding. And Pia will get some if she ever decides to get married, which she doggedly insists she’ll NEVER ever do, ever. Ever! EVER. She’s a career woman, she insists, and she likes her freedom. But there are layers of irony here: First, her photography studio is on the ropes. And second, that jewelry is so valuable, she could sell it and pay off the business’ growing stack of past-due bills. Deep sigh!
So Pia returns to the studio so her gay bestie/employee Jay (Luke Fetherston) can listen to her moan and whine, because he has no other function in life beyond being the one-man support network to a hard-luck movie protag. Does he have other friends or family members or a sex/dating life of his own? Who knows! Not important! He exists to assist Pia every step of the way during her pragmatic and existential crises, cracking jokes about how he never gets paid, bringing her pizza and champagne when she’s feeling down, taking care of the business that she owns and standing by her side as she participates in Sonal’s “wedding month.” Month?!? Yes, month. Indian weddings are epic, Pia explains to Caucasian Jay. She’s the maid of honor, so she attends the first of several zillion wedding-related events, where a fortune teller will read the bride’s palm – and then he grabs Pia’s mitt and proclaims that she’ll find her husband within the next five dates. So much for any plans Jay might have had. But that’s a joke! Jay never has plans of his own!
And so various family members set Pia up on dates, and oh golly, are they doozies. The rich guy just wants to pay her to be by his side while his servants hover nearby. The yoga guy is a flat-earther. The sweet conservative guy is secretly in love with Pia’s mom. Charlie (Hero Fiennes Tiffin) gets a name and an actor’s name in a parenthetical because he’s Pia’s ex, who she’ll have to deal with for a month because he’s also the best man. And oh golly are these emotional-rollercoaster dates full of wacky antics or, in the case of Charlie, long-simmering tension. Acrimony on the brink of matrimony – go figure! This all seems so hopeless and miserable for Pia, but hey, at least she participates in the movie’s premise even though it seems to go against her personal values, although those values put her where she is now, sad and lonely and in the red. Good thing she’s in a rom-com, because otherwise, her problems might be difficult to manage instead of subject to whimsical screenplay miracles. Phew!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Two decades have passed since The Wedding Date, and its premise remains almost exactly the same.
Performance Worth Watching: Ashley almost single-handedly makes Picture This worth your time. Her performance is funny and smart in spite of material that dampens those qualities by putting her character in dopey situations.
Memorable Dialogue: Pia snarks about her sex life: “It’s like an abandoned subway down there.”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: I poke fun at Picture This and its myriad rom-com cliches out of affection – and because it totally deserves it. Such is the fence one may find oneself sitting on. This is a bright, bubbly, lightweight flick boosted by Ashley’s thoroughly charming performance. But it also offers not a single damn thing that’s fresh and exciting to its genre, and is weighed down by Tiffin’s uninspired presence and lack of hormonal chemistry with Ashley. Blame the screenplay for setting up Pia as someone dead-set on defying tradition, but ultimately about-face conforming to it in absolute sync to the movie’s droolingly thoughtless devotion to the etched-in-stone cliches of romantic comedies. Watching the movie isn’t at all an unpleasant experience, but it’s also a disappointing one.
Let’s properly contextualize Picture This: The rom-com has rebounded from a rather dire state recently. Challengers robustly pushed the genre into new territory. Anyone But You and The Idea of You got by on the star-powered chemistry of their leads. Hit Man and The Fall Guy blurred boundaries by incorporating elements of thrillers and action films. Picture This obviously doesn’t boast the name recognition or budget of these other movies, but that’s not an excuse for its apparent lack of desire to transcend the limitations of formula. It had an opportunity to draft on the success of its predecessors, but fails to deliver anything new, skewing toward Hallmark Channel banality.
And that notion extends to the comedy, because it’s hard to make audiences laugh at goofy bits and awkward situations that are uniformly derivative. It’s admirable when a movie ventures into fresh realms of cultural representation, but deflating when it forgoes specificity for the same old broad, boring jokes and character arcs. Yet it might be worth a look just for Ashley, who seems to have a bright future in films with better writing.
Our Call: Medium-bored rom-com diehards may find something of interest in Picture This, but for the rest of us? SKIP IT and hope Ashley soon turns up in something with more creative rigor.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.