This article is taken from the February 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

The essential problem of a romantic comedy is simple: given that these two people should obviously be together, why aren’t they? If the reason is that they’re with other people, then those people must at once be likeable enough that you don’t think less of the main characters for being with them, but not so likeable that you’re upset when they are inevitably dumped.

In the 1930s, Hollywood solved this problem — and got around restrictions that prevented references to extra marital sex — with the “comedy of remarriage”: the two people had been together, but had stupidly fallen out, and the film was about them realising this.

These days, it’s hard to come up with reasons for lovers to be star-crossed

Modern cinema has given us instead the Perfectly Nice But Unexciting Boyfriend. Sleepless in Seattle makes a good attempt at this, but it’s not entirely satisfactory. Sure, Tom Hanks is great, but would you really risk Bill Pullman for a shot at him?

That film at least has a really good barrier for the hero and heroine to overcome: they’re on opposite sides of a continent, and have never met.

These days, it’s hard to come up with reasons for lovers to be star-crossed. Everyone fleetingly met can be tracked
down on social media, and there aren’t a lot of relationship decisions that society disapproves of. Celia Johnson, meeting Trevor Howard on a railway platform, would simply have left her husband for him, making Brief Encounter even briefer.

Perhaps this explains the wave of period dramas over the last few years, with their pleasing supply of Plausible Obstacles To Happiness: class boundaries, parental disapproval, lost communications.

What’s Love Got To Do With It? is a contemporary romance that finds a way to revive these older blocks on the road to true love. Zoe, played by Lily James, is a London filmmaker working on a documentary about her childhood friend and next-door neighbour Kazim (Shazad Latif), who has agreed to let his Pakistan-born parents arrange his marriage.

Clearly Zoe and Kazim belong together, and here is an obstacle straight from Jane Austen: his parents would forbid such a match. Even better, there is a dark family secret, a sister who shamed her parents by marrying without their consent.

It makes for an enjoyable romcom, with most of the laughs coming from Emma Thompson as Zoe’s mother and Asim Chaudhry as “Mo The Matchmaker”, employed to find a bride for Kazim. Ben Ashenden and Alexander Owen, whose Zoom videos captured and helped to relieve the horrors of lockdown, make brief appearances as Olly and Olly, the enjoyably awful commissioners of Zoe’s film.

James, often stuck as a placeholder-girlfriend-character in films about other people, has more to work with here as someone wrestling with her feelings for the man she’s supposed to be making a film about. Latif has the arguably harder job of seeming plausible as a successful young professional who has agreed to let his parents choose him a wife he’s never met from the mother country. He pulls it off, playing Kazim as a son who just wants to make his mother happy.

The question the film poses is whether “assisted marriage”, as Kazim prefers to call it, is just another way of finding love, an alternative to Zoe’s unhappy Tinder dates and nightclub hook-ups, or an out-of-date legacy from a more constricted age.

If there’s a frustration here, it’s that having asked the question, screenwriter Jemima Khan backs away from it. Zoe lets her mother fix her up with a Perfectly Nice But Unexciting Vet. Kazim finds his own assisted relationship unhappy, but the film stops short of saying the idea is a mistake.

Kazim finds his own assisted relationship unhappy, but the film stops short of saying the idea is a mistake

When Richard Curtis wrote Four Weddings and a Funeral, he said he’d done so to explain to his parents why he never wanted to get married. His cynicism about the institution gave the film much of its edge. Curtis was delighted to mock big posh weddings and hopeless priests, but Khan is carefully respectful of the whole idea of arranged marriage, even when one is the central obstacle in her film. In the end, there’s a sense that she’s trying to have things both ways. As The Beatles almost sang, All You Need Is Love Or For Your Parents To Find You Someone From A Nice Family.

It’s an interesting film to watch alongside India Sweets and Spices, a comedy-drama from America also set inside an immigrant community. Despite what some of the marketing suggests, this isn’t really a romcom: the romance between the lead characters encounters no obstacles beyond a misunderstanding, and the stakes are low: it’s not even clear that it’s much more than a summer fling. Instead, this is a family drama about a daughter discovering the reality of her parents’ lives.

It is spikier than the British film. Writer-director Geeta Malik is comfortable mocking super-wealthy Indian-Americans, whom she portrays as competitive consumers and gossiping hypocrites. The secrets in this family are far darker and less easily resolved than those in What’s Love Got To Do With It? Sophia Ali is suitably sullen as the student daughter returned to the nest for her summer vacation, and English actor Rish Shah smoulders well as her love interest. But the story is really her parents, and how they became the people their daughter now despises.

Perhaps this is the solution to the modern romcom problem: a broadening of vision. Neither romance, nor comedy, nor drama stops on the wedding day.