What does love have to do with it? review – smooth Richard Curtis-esque Britcom | Toronto Film Festival 2022

ONEAt the same festival where Billy Eichner just tried to revive the once-lucrative Apatow formula of sweet and salty with his queer comedy Bros, Shekhar Kapur, director of Elizabeth and the Bandit Queen, returns after a long absence to try to revive the equally popular and equally sleepy Working Title romcom with What’s Love Got to Do with It?, a fun, frothy and forgettable itch. Both stick to a familiar subgenre playbook that essentially comes with a strict style guide attached, but both also try to find a diverse retelling of stories that have traditionally been told with white, straight people at the center.

Kapur’s isn’t quite as successful or specific as Eichner’s, but it’s a smart reminder of the soothing comfort that comes from the Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner plan – all beautiful London locations and big, unfettered emotion – and it’s smooth and likable enough to encourage more of the same (rumors of a fourth Bridget Jones film are likely to be confirmed within weeks). Kapur may not have any experience in the comedy genre, but his lavish, action-heavy period dramas have allowed him to master epic screen storytelling, giving the film a glossy grandeur that’s been missing from the romcom ever since Netflix helped bring it back and flat out. it down. It looks and feels big, sliding between continents and cultures, place to place to place. It may never reach emotions of the same magnitude, but its lightness is hard to resist.

He is working on a script by Jemima Khan that draws elements from her own experience of marrying a Muslim man and living in Pakistan, focusing on childhood friends who live on the same street but come from different backgrounds. Zoe (Lily James) has found a successful career as a documentary filmmaker, but the weight of her subjects has made it difficult to find funding. When her longtime friend Kaz (Shazad Latif) announces that he is starting the arranged marriage process, driven by his own desire to do so rather than parental coercion, she sees his journey as inspiration for a new film that follows him all the way down working with his camera.

The production process involves the couple discussing romance and love and what it all means, a sub-When Harry Met Sally back and forth that mostly stays on the surface, fun enough to watch but rarely insightful. Khan’s script is about competence rather than creativity: a sound structure, a driving pace and a learned awareness of genre conventions, but dialogue that often feels a little first draft, a little placeholder-heavy, zingers that don’t quite sing as they should. A running theme that sees Zoe bring harsh reality to adventures doesn’t work the way the film seems to think, though it’s refreshing to see James get to play something with a little more depth than she’s often afforded . Too often she gets stuck playing characters that make more sense as male fantasy than female reality (she, and we, deserved more from Cinderella, Baby Driver and Yesterday), but Zoe has more of an edge and falters on the concept of marriage and uses drunken sex as a pick-me-up, inconsistent with many of the romcom tropes the Working Title stable helped cement. At times I wish the script had gone a little further, especially with her take on the concept of motherhood, but James is good at the edgier stuff, as she recently showed in the otherwise underwhelming Pam & Tommy. She has an easy, if never quite electric, chemistry with a charming latif.

Longtime Richard Curtis collaborator Emma Thompson also turns up as Zoe’s mother, fresh off arguably her biggest work to date in Good Luck to You Leo Grande (deserving every ounce of her Oscar buzz), but her presence is rather tiresome, over-egging comedy support in a way that feels oversized and uncomfortable, sinking rather than stealing scenes. It’s far more rewarding to see Indian star Shabana Azmi as the other, more layered matriarch, a shrewd actress who eschews clichés as a woman who embraces both tradition and modernity, and she sells us on the difficulty of that wrestling. The film doesn’t really have any deep statements to make about arranged marriages or marriage in general, but it also avoids leaning into a simplistic Western judgment, the overall conclusion being that love can happen with anyone anywhere, no real or wrong way.

What’s love got to do with What’s love got to do with it? For us, in the end, very little. But there are plenty of similar ones here instead.