Lily James, right, stars with Shazad Latif in What's Love Got To Do With It? James portrays a documentarian who follows the marital process of her childhood neighbour through her camera's lens.Courtesy of TIFF
There is no truth universally acknowledged as to why some marriages work and why some fail. Each union is as unique as the two people bound in matrimony, until the knot gets undone.
The social construct of marriage, nevertheless, continues to have a stronghold on us. And the South Asian tradition of arranged marriages is still an object of fascination – especially for those outside the culture. What else would explain the continuing onslaught of books, TV series and movies that want to unpack the notion of the modern arranged marriage – and why young people in South Asia and its diaspora would allow their families to set them up.
It’s got the perfect masala for a pitch. A rom-com with a soupçon of exotic culture thrown in – colourful costumes and dance routines, eccentric aunties and uncles, an exasperated younger generation. It’s a formula that could appeal to a cross-section of markets, besides fulfilling an inclusion rider.
The latest film set to join the wedding buffet is What’s Love Got To Do With It? Directed by Shekhar Kapur (Elizabeth, The Four Feathers) and written by Jemima Khan, the movie had a gala presentation at the Toronto International Film Festival last month.
The story goes thus: Zoe (Lily James) is a documentary filmmaker. Her next-door neighbour and childhood friend, Kazim (Shazad Latif) is a doctor. Floundering in front of two producers to green light her next project, Zoe pitches Kazim’s traditional search for a bride. She then manages to convince Kazim and his parents – the mother is played by veteran Indian actor Shabana Azmi – to let her document the “assisted marriage,” even as she has to fend off attempts by her divorcée mother, Cath (Emma Thompson), to set her up.
Pitched as a rom-com that flits between London and Lahore, and tradition and modernity, What’s Love Got to Do With It? suffers from the same issue that Zoe has to contend with. It is ultimately a white woman’s gaze on another culture. Khan may well have a particular insight into Pakistani society and their taur-tareeke (customs and rituals), given that she was once married to Pakistani cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan. She was also an executive producer of the Emmy-nominated HBO series The Case Against Adnan Syed, among other documentaries.
It’s truly baffling then, as to how What’s Love Got To Do With It? doesn’t avoid glaring blind spots. The movie does make a brief point of differentiating between arranged and forced marriages. However, by playing Zoe’s independent, free-spirited doc-maker – who’s failing miserably on the dating scene – off against Kazim’s scrubbed-up-doctor – whose search for love is as halal as it gets – the film sets up binaries that don’t adequately explore the grey areas in any relationship.
For example, when Kazim video calls Maymouna (Sajal Aly), an aspiring human-rights lawyer from Lahore, it’s clear there’s something amiss. It’s a credit to the actors Latif and Aly, well-known in their own industries, who clearly have the chops to add depth to an otherwise banal bit of screenplay.
The lack of nuance is even more stupefying given Kapur’s directorial debut, Masoom, made almost four decades ago. It was a delicate look at a marriage about to fall apart after the revelation of infidelity. Azmi’s performance as a wife who feels alternatively betrayed and empathetic toward the child born out of her husband’s short-lived affair is moving. Her role as the matriarch in What’s Love Got to Do With It?, on the other hand, doesn’t offer much scope for complexity.
Are South Asian marriages – whether arranged or not – an interesting subject to explore? Absolutely. A 2021 BBC report included results from an Indian survey of more than 160,000 households in 2018, which found that 93 per cent of married Indians said they had an arranged marriage. Three per cent had a “love marriage,” while another 2 per cent described their union as an arranged-love marriage.
Suraj Sharma as Ravi, left, and Pallavi Sharda as Asha in the Netflix film Wedding Season.Ken Woroner/Netflix
Whether you get an arranged marriage, an arranged-love marriage or a love marriage, there are many reasons to stay in the relationship – even if it’s not working out. No one wants to be seen as a failure. Sometimes you stick around for the kids, or sometimes you carry out a sham to appease an elder on their deathbed. For some, marriage provides social and economic stability. Or, when it’s not worth all the effort, you call it quits.
For better or for worse, the many permutations of a marriage can provide rich fodder for entertainment. If you’re looking for laughs, along with a side of cultural curiosity, you’d be much better served by TV series and movies available on streaming platforms, besides digging into the back catalogue of Bollywood and other South Asian cinema.
As much as I roll my eyes at the matchmaker Sima Aunty and her shenanigans, Netflix’s series Indian Matchmaking provides insights – admittedly limited – into the ways in which issues such as misogyny, a preference for “fair skin” and caste continue to play out in India and abroad.
The recent Toronto-shot Netflix film Wedding Season, meanwhile, is a rom-com movie about two Indian-Americans who get set up by their parents, but then decide to fake-date through a summer of weddings. The dated formula still makes for a breezy watch because of the two leads, Suraj Sharma (Life of Pi) and Pallavi Sharda (Lion) – who play a DJ and an economist, respectively, in a refreshing change of careers for South Asians on screen.
Made in Heaven, a Prime Video series created by Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti, features a more sumptuous exploration of all manner of Indian wedlocks. The series centres around Tara and Karan, a wedding planning duo based out of New Delhi, who provide a range of services to Indian elites while navigating messy personal lives. Each wedding ceremony offers up an example of a society teetering between tradition and modern ambition. While Prime Video announced Made in Heaven’s second season as part of its slate of shows for 2022, no dates have been announced for its release yet.
Meanwhile, I’m excited for the release of the second season of the Netflix show Mismatched on Oct 14. The book When Dimple Met Rishi, which the series is based on, didn’t hold much of my attention as I speed-read through it. It told the story of Dimple Shah, an aspiring tech nerd who ends up attending the same summer web development camp in San Francisco as Rishi Patel, the guy her parents want to set her up with.
Mismatched moves the setting from California to Rajasthan and adds a whole bunch of context to Dimple and Rishi, as well as a cast of characters who come with their own baggage of insecurities and anxieties, while trying to navigate friendship and romance at a summer camp. The well-attuned ensemble cast give life to the show’s banter-filled dialogues, written by a team including Gazal Dhaliwal, who wrote Bollywood’s first mainstream lesbian love story Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga.
Mismatched won me over with its fresh blend of South Asian pop culture and sociological insight. While happiness in marriage might be a matter of chance, I wager this second season might be just the balm I’m looking for.
Special to The Globe and Mail