Brought to you by the critically acclaimed director Shekhar Kapur (“Mr. India” and “Elizabeth”), “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” is a love story that traverses physical, emotional, and cultural borders. The film follows Kaz Khan (Shazad Latif) as he navigates his understanding of love and duty to his family and his childhood friend Zoe (Lily James), a filmmaker who decides to film his arranged marriage.
“What’s Love Got to Do With It?” is a rom-com that follows classic British films like “Love Actually” and “Bend It Like Beckham” in its charming exploration of modern-day love stories and the many barriers and challenges to finding love.
The Art of Genre Bending
Growing up, most of the love stories I watched that depicted intercultural relationships often portrayed these love stories as liberation from cultural tradition: parents insisting on an arranged marriage, sons reluctantly rejecting Brown women with no names, and white women offering men a ticket out. These representations of intercultural love reinstated notions of whiteness being inextricably tied with modernity and liberation and left South Asian women with no agency.
At first, I expected yet another movie with that same narrative. Instead, the film took unexpected turns that humanized every person. Every character, no matter how small or big the role, was given depth which, in turn, helped us understand and empathize with their motives. Their unexpected actions broke the story free from stereotypical understandings of South Asian femininity, masculinity, and tradition. For example, Kaz’s openness to an arranged marriage and going through with it opposes stereotypical understandings of the young British immigrant who rejects tradition.
Kapur told Mochi that his biggest challenge was taking the story outside of what people traditionally think of as a rom-com. “A rom-com is a term we use for a certain kind of film, but that confines the film,” he said. “I wanted…
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