What’s Love Got to Do with It?: Second-Hand Emotion, by David Bax

It brings me no joy to report that the intellectual laziness of Shekhar Kapur‘s What’s Love Got to Do with It? does not end with the lifting of its title from an already very famous movie. It’s also the kind of picture that thinks an introductory line like, “Long time, no see, miss award-winning documentary filmmaker!” counts as some sort of character development. And when the screenplay (by Jemima Khan) does strain for cleverness, it ends up with groaners like Lily James‘ Zoe declaring that Cinderella ought to be “breaking glass ceilings instead of glass slippers.”

In another copy and paste instance, Zoe’s childhood friend Kaz (Shazad Latif) comments, “Whatever ‘in love’ means,” first famously intoned by Prince Charles about his future wife Diana. In this case, though, it’s an apropos bit of theft since What’s Love Got to Do with It? is a movie about arranged marriages. Though Kapur and Khan feint at taking the tradition and its religious roots seriously (there’s a bit about how you should never cheat even if you don’t get caught because “He’d know”), the practice is really just a jumping off point for Zoe to make trite speeches and say things like, “Am I just half a person if I’m not with a man?!”

One stolen bit of the film that I’m okay with, though, is the interspersing of interviews with happily married couples whose weddings were arranged. Kapur doesn’t hide the homage to When Harry Met Sally… and, as a result, the implied argument that these stories can be just as loving and heartwarming as those which are the result of contemporary Western courting norms makes a better case for arranged marriages than anything else in the movie.

What’s Love Got to Do with It?‘s biggest mistake is making Zoe its lead. In case you missed it, she’s an award-winning documentary filmmaker and her latest idea is to mine her old pal’s life for fodder and make a documentary about arranged marriage called Love Contractually. The film never takes a moment to come to terms with the fact that a white Westerner making such a movie in the present day sounds like an enormously terrible idea. But it does paint Zoe as someone incomprehensibly naïve and easily flabbergasted for a documentarian, a role one would expect to require some open-minded intellectual curiosity. The only thing believable about Zoe as a character is that white Westerners can be patronizingly fascinated with the traditions of other cultures.

Well, it’s time to say something nice about What’s Love Got to Do with It? It’s opening in theaters as opposed to going straight to streaming and, luckily, it looks like it. The movie doesn’t look flat and paint-by-numbers like so much mid-tier, interchangeable “content.” Credit that to the wise move to hire Remi Adefarasin (Elizabeth, The House of Mirth, Match Point) as cinematographer.

Other than that, though, What’s Love Got to Do with It? doesn’t do much to redeem itself. Its final insult that it’s not happy to only center Zoe in its story. It also ultimately defaults to her kneejerk judgement. Western values prevail in a way that feels like nothing whatsoever was accomplished in the course of the film’s 108 minutes.