What’s Love Got to Do with It? film review — cross-cultural romcom breaks no boundaries

Was ever a film so entwined with London house prices as Notting Hill? The 1999 romcom union of Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts caught the start of the long upswing of the capital’s property market. But in the small way a beloved movie can, it shaped the future too. Before the film, the area was still a shabby-chic bohemia. Yet its vast success helped pave the way for a new W11: a boutique postcode for the hipper Russian oligarch.

Of course, times have now changed again. For proof, see What’s Love Got to Do with It?, the sugared comedy of heartache from Notting Hill’s fabled producers Working Title. That this is a romcom for a different age is never clearer than where it unfolds. While Grant and Roberts strolled through a pastel Portobello Road, we are now worlds apart — if just two stops down the Central Line — in scuffed Shepherd’s Bush.

Still, some things are forever even this side of the Westway. The core Working Title formula remains the playbook of Jane Austen, lightly tweaked. As directed by veteran Shekhar Kapur (Elizabeth), our heroine is Zoe (Lily James), a chipper, socially conscious documentary maker whose home is a houseboat, prettily moored by Chelsea’s Albert Bridge. But the Bush where she grew up with a heart-of-gold mum (Emma Thompson) is just a black cab ride away.

So too the Khans, the British-Pakistani neighbours whose oldest son Kaz (Shazad Latif) was Zoe’s childhood best friend. In adulthood, he has morphed into a soulful oncology registrar, still grounded enough for kickabout football.

James and Latif have chemistry. Even if they didn’t, the film’s intentions would be obvious. But Kaz is allowed complexity. Committed to Islam, he has decided to enter an arranged marriage with a Pakistani bride. (The term these days, we learn, is “assisted”.) He will fall in love in line with tradition. “Whatever ‘in love’ means,” he smiles. As the film points out, the phrase echoes the then-Prince Charles, speaking ahead of his own assisted marriage to Diana Spencer.

Let us pause for back-story. More so than Kapur or even Working Title, the film’s mastermind is writer Jemima Khan. Now a documentary producer, Khan was close to the late Princess of Wales. Between 1995 and 2004 she was also married to cricketer and politician Imran Khan, later to become Pakistani prime minister. And while it is unclear how much of their romance took place in Shepherd’s Bush, their story promises a certain authentic cross-cultural insight.

Yet reality feels sparingly measured out. At the edges of the story, Khan has insidery fun with a pair of idiot TV producers. But the culture clash at the movie’s heart can have a plastic quality. Kaz’s desire to marry another Muslim and his complaints of being taken for a terrorist smack of bullet points: mere obstacles to Zoe’s happy ending.

Is it asking too much of a simple romcom to explore such loaded ideas more deeply before lunging for the kiss? Between the whirr of the plot, it sometimes almost does. Expectations flip on location in Lahore; elsewhere we ponder the free-for-all of western romance, assisted by Tinder. But really the movie is a brightly coloured skimmed surface with old-fashioned dreams. It only wants to find a girl, standing in front of a boy, a thousand lovestruck London estate agents looking on.

★★★☆☆

In cinemas from February 24