Film: What’s Love Got To Do With It?

This one got a look in due to a broken arm (giving my injury its full title rather than the actual 2 fractures in my wrist seeing as it has immobilised me in so many ways, including typing with my less dominant left hand). I simply didin’t want 2 hours of John Wick 4 bon- breaking.

Anyway, the trailer looked fun and having Emma Thompson playing a well-to-do Londonite mother (ahem) is good enough for a comfort watch for me. Cathy lives next door to a Pakistani Muslim family whose son Kaz is the best mate of her own film-maker daughter, Zoe seeing as they have grown up together, tree houses and everything and Cathy adores the family.

[Spoiler alert: we know where this is going but hey ho)

Zoe finds her (bad) dates through apps while Kaz has decided to go down his mum and dad’s route and asks for an arranged marriage to a woman from their homeland Pakistan. I’m unsure if his living was ever mentioned. Despite a disastrous no-chemistry Skype call by introduction, somehow a blingy marriage is arranged and Zoe manages to get a commission (queue 2 clueless white men) to make a documentary about it. Possibly because she came up with the brilliant name “Love Contractually”. Off she trots to Pakistan, with her mum in tow, shooting everything herself, no camera person, no director, no team. 

We learn all we need to know about the new bride within a few scenes but the film is much more about, which version of love works, the one that grows over time or the more instantaneous one.

Written by Jemima Khan no less, and she knows a thing or two. 

6½/10