[Warning: Spoilers galore!]
I was very intrigued by the billing of this "cross-cultural romantic comedy" that had a number of celebrity names attached to it - Director Shekhar Kapur, screenwriter Jemima Khan and top stars Emma Thompson and Shabana Azmi.
As the film began, I was also happy to see that it starred Shazad Latif, whom I'd seen before as Ash Tyler in Star Trek - Discovery.
The film began promisingly enough, but to cut a long story short, it posed a question that was illogical, and then answered it with a cop-out ending.
I won't bother going through the entire plot with its twists and turns, since you can find those in other reviews. Let me explain why I felt the way I did about this movie.
The movie moved quickly onto its plot premise - the phenomenon of arranged marriages (also called "assisted marriages") prevalent in the Indian subcontinent. A number of pros and cons were aired in early dialogues, so the question set up by the movie was clear:
Are arranged marriages better than "love marriages"? The definition of "better" is of course vague. Is it the durability of the marriage itself, the happiness of the partners, the stability of the family setup for children, the harmony of the larger families involved, etc.?
This question strikes me as absurd because it sounds like "What arrangement of deck chairs would be better at preventing the sinking of the Titanic?"
The necessary conditions for a successful marriage should be no secret:
- Mutual respect and trust
- A willingness on the part of both partners to learn, adapt and change themselves
Additionally, if the partners possess complementary strengths and have the patience to communicate in a way that is aligned to their partner's thinking style, they're set to be a winning team.
Needless to say, the circumstances under which the two partners come together is irrelevant. They could have met on their own and fallen in love, or they could have been introduced by their parents and agreed to marry before they had significant feelings for each other. Heck, they could even have been forced into marriage, for that matter!
So that in a nutshell is why I thought the film went completely off-target. I have seen examples of successful and unsuccessful "love marriages" in real life. I have also seen examples of successful and unsuccessful arranged marriages. It's clear as day to me that this categorisation is completely irrelevant when it comes to predicting the success of a marriage or the happiness of a couple. Without mutual respect and trust, and without a willingness on the part of both partners to learn, to adapt and to change themselves, a marriage cannot "succeed" or be a happy one. It has nothing to do with whether the marriage was "arranged" or took place after the two partners had fallen in love. The film didn't bother to raise this most important aspect of the topic at all (although it made an attempt to address the issue of marital fidelity, which is related to trust).
At the end of the movie, the arranged marriage of the male lead (Qazim Khan) fails, because it turns out that his bride was in love with someone else, and was forced by her parents into marrying him. They divorce and she leaves to rejoin her lover. Predictably, Qazim then pairs up with his childhood neighbour and friend (Zoe), who has been cataloguing the entire process of his arranged marriage.
In the style of "Four Weddings and a Funeral" then, the movie turned out to be "Two Love Marriages and the Failure of an Arranged Marriage".
The reason I call this a "cop-out" ending is because this seems to be the only acceptable answer that filmdom anywhere is allowed to provide: Love-before-marriage good, arranged marriage bad.
Even in India, where over 90% of all marriages are arranged, Bollywood and regional cinema only promote a romantic narrative where people fall in love and often battle parental and societal opposition to get married. The big screen doesn't reflect societal reality at all!
Is it possible at all for a movie to be honest and matter-of-fact about this topic, I wonder? Or will fear of box office failure forever keep storytellers from telling the unglamorous truth about what a happy marriage really needs?
[If you liked this post, check out a related one - "Why Marriage Is Hard Work - Two Psychometric Models Provide An Answer"]
