Shekhar Kapur’s What’s Love Got To Do With It exudes a familiar yet unexplored energy, largely because of its apt casting.
It’s time to celebrate. Shekhar Kapur’s What’s Love Got To Do With It is his first film in fifteen years. Shekhar last directed Elizabeth: The Golden Age in 2007. It was one of the gloomiest film I had ever seen. Going by the trailer of What’s Love Got To Do With It (the title is a Tina Turner song)it is also his most effervescent film since Mr India.
The Paki-British cross-cultural romance is set in London. Like Dhanush and Nithya Menen, in Thiruchitrambalam the couple in Shekhar’s film are so close to one another that they don’t realize they are meant to be much more than friends.
What’s Love Got To Do With It exudes a familiar yet unexplored energy, largely because the casting is so right: British actress Lily James is Zoe, the bubbly British lass, the quintessential Girl Next Door, who is a filmmaker, while the Boy Next door is the Pakistani Kazim (Shazad Latif) whose work I haven’t seen before. Latif seems the perfect fit for the Pakistani-British chap who believes marriages are made in heaven.
And what the hell! Why is Kazim taking off for Pakistan to marry the nice sweet Pakistani girl, played by Sajal Ali who played Sridevi’s daughter in Mom (back then our cinema could do these things)? We all know how this is going to end. And yet the entire process of finding one’s way to love is made into a rollicking journey by Shekhar who can be a real sport if he sets his heart to it.
And What’s Love Got To Do With It is all heart. From the opening shots of the trailer where Lily James and then her mother played by Emma Thompson (the father of the house has eloped with, and I quote Ms Thompson, a teenaged whore) try to say “Assalamualaikum” the correct way to their Pakistani neighbours and fail.
Thompson whom I recently saw in the delightfully sexy Good Luck To You, Leo Grande (what’s with Emma and these long titles?) and Shabana Azmi are to me the fulcrum of the festive comedy. Shabana looks chic in a Londoner’s wig. Shekhar Kapur has completely revamped her look. And she is looking like a million bucks.
I didn’t see enough of Shabana and Emma Thompson together in the trailer, though I suspect there would be a lot more of them in the film itself. For now, the trailer serves up sufficient sparks. It is a cross-cultural love story which doesn’t take itself too seriously. The Pakistani family is not embarrassed to take potshots at its own narrow worldview.
At one point in the trailer, Kazim’s grandmother tells Kazim’s wife-to-be in Pakistan, “Living here(in London) is like living in one big kotha (brothel).”
The old in romcoms are allowed to get away with boggy behaviour.
What’s Love Got To Do With It looks like an unalloyed joyride with ample digs at Asian conservatism as opposed to British ‘liberalism’(which is actually conservatism cloaked in jingoism). It isn’t anything that we haven’t seen before. But Shekhar Kapur knows how a to tailor something unworn out of familiar material.
Fateh Ali Khan shows up towards the end of the trailer as part of the wedding entertainment. The wedding in Pakistan is not happening. But the music certainly is. Bring out the festivities.
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