The Representational Politics of Love in “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” 

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 people to understand that when you say arranged marriages or assisted marriages, [it] is not some strange custom in the East or in Pakistan or in India. It happens all over the world.”

The depth of characterization challenged my own notions and readings of love, and I found myself rooting and not rooting for certain pairings. I started off rooting for Kaz and Maimuna (the woman he is arranged to marry) to have a successful marriage. But through the course of the film, I found myself surprisingly rooting for Zoe to win Kaz’s heart instead. These two relationships — Kaz and Zoe, and Kaz and Maimuna — are a great spotlight on how the protagonist’s ties to his culture, community, and history shape his connections to two women. None of the relationships pass as straightforward acts of acceptance or defiance of tradition.

Though Kaz and Zoe don’t share a language or experience of growing up in the U.K., they share history, London, and secrets. Zoe even attends Eid parties and has a healthy relationship with Kaz’s family. However, Kaz and Maimuna provide a more complicated look into the distinctions between South Asian immigrants and people born and raised in South Asia, where every assumed similarity because of a shared ethnic background is actually a marked difference. 

Between the Notes: Love, Music, and Understanding 

A particularly striking moment in the film is when Kaz and Zoe wander the streets of Lahore and share an unspoken intimate moment as they watch Sufi singer Rahat Fateh Ali Khan sing. The scene is well choreographed in its simplicity, and is a pivotal point in Zoe and Kaz’s relationship and their own conceptions of love and passion. Choosing to use a moment fueled with Sufi music and devoid of heavy dialogue highlighted their love and connection beyond the obvious, connecting histories through touch and understanding.

Kapur said the way Khan sings, the way his hands, voice, and eyes move, they all work together to bring out passion. “I wanted that passion to come across to Lily James playing Zoe, to understand that this is how she discovered love and she falls in love with this idea of Sufism, which just brings her closer to Kaz and makes her express herself,” he shared. “And, I mean, the idea of having Rahat on camera was amazing, because I don’t know anybody else who can express Sufi singing the way he does.”

Latif added that he didn’t really have to do much, that it was about listening, feeling, and reacting to what James was doing. “We got to watch a live gig by one of the greatest singers ever, so the emotion — in the sense — was there, when music ignites stuff inside you,” he said. “It’s just about slight movements and very, very little things of feeling that energy between each other because you both know that you like each other, but no one’s said it yet. It’s just an energy thing at that moment.”

Love’s Got to Do With the Messiness

Though I enjoyed the movie, the film occasionally slipped into stereotypical narratives, with rigid elders that control marital decisions and tradition not holding up in its expected ways. 

I wondered if Kaz’s final choices on marriage and love stemmed from a natural disillusionment in his simplistic understanding of the ways of the world or if he had been “liberated” from his oppressive understanding of love. The former is an interesting challenge to how immigrants culturally and philosophically contend with multiple halves of many wholes. 

I wish his motives were more clearly depicted, even though Latif described the love story as one with a happy ending, that “there were struggles along the way and there were arguments, and then they had kids … it is love lasting forever because they got through the tough bit.” 

If the tough bit is the messiness, I would have loved to see more of how Kaz continued to contend with his strong sense of religion and family that, in many ways, opposed what a relationship with Zoe could mean. Some scenes alluded to the more subtle ways he does this, but I would have liked to see more. 

I do feel that this movie is a step in a path less taken, a path I would love to see more filmmakers take. The movie centers the inner conflicts of a charming, multifaceted lead whose background drives him, but doesn’t define him in his journey through life. 

Films like “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” encourage viewers to leave space for a less critical and more empathetic understanding of love. An understanding that does not write us as merely our race or gender, but rather as the complicated people we are and the complex reasons for which we choose to love and not love people. We are living beings who love based on our experiences and the ways we have been transformed, carrying the bruises of manipulation. Loving is rather the attitude of being faithful, yet questioning the constraints of a broader, elusive notion of home and culture.