Jemima Khan’s Had Enough of Fairy Tales

In What’s Love Got to Do With It?, the new romantic comedy written and co-produced by Jemima Khan, the traditional fairy tale has become obsolete. The protagonist, Zoe Stevenson (Lily James), is a documentary filmmaker whose romantic failures and perennial singledom mean that she’s often being asked to babysit her friend’s children. To get them to sleep she tells them revamped fairy tales, which invariably become pessimistic commentaries on the failings of modern love. The princes in Zoe’s Cinderella are either boring or obnoxious; the beast in her Beauty is a sexual predator; and when the titular amphibian in Zoe’s The Princess and the Frog asks to be freed from his unfortunate state, the princess tells him she isn’t interested in fixing anyone but herself.

Though she doesn’t feel comfortable calling the film a critique of modernity, Khan admits that she doesn’t really know what “happily ever after” is supposed to mean in the modern world of dating apps and websites. “I think that having too many options is potentially as problematic as having too few,” she tells Vanity Fair. “[It] tends to make people feel that other human beings are disposable.”

While Zoe struggles to navigate the pitfalls of 21st-century dating, the story takes a subversive turn when her neighbor and childhood friend, Kazim (Shazad Latif), reveals to her that he’s delegated the business of finding a suitable spouse for him to his Pakistani parents. He’s looking for a girl modern enough for him to relate to and traditional enough for his parents to approve of, but beyond that he presents himself as open to suggestion. As a philosophy, this puts him firmly at odds with his childhood friend—for whom love can never be associated with compromise.  

Khan wrote the film inspired by the decade she spent living in Pakistan as the wife of cricketer turned politician Imran Khan. While living in Lahore with Imran’s extended family, she was able to observe many successful arranged marriages at close quarters. “I don’t believe that there’s one right way to find love, but I do believe that it’s really easy to kind of demonize other people’s way of doing it,” she says. “I definitely do not subscribe to the idea that the arranged marriage candidate presented in most films that touch on this subject, particularly comedies, has to be the butt of the jokes.”

Khan, a journalist and film producer who describes herself as equal parts cynic and romantic, moved back to Britain in 2004, when her marriage ended. Still just 30, she found herself surrounded by friends her own age who were looking to settle down and find partners to have children with. “I kind of became the Pakistani auntie,” she says. “Who would your parents— imagine that you take away the component of lust and sexual chemistry and survey the options through the eyes of the people who know you best and love you most—who would they select? And would that work out?”

The answer is—as far as the film is concerned—that there’s no way of knowing what will work out. Indeed, in Khan’s cross-cultural romance, directed by Shekhar Kapur, the pursuit of love becomes something of an existential burden, an assignment so necessary and yet so fraught with danger that it has spawned an entire industry of clichés and matchmaking methodologies. Popular depictions, according to Khan, tend to elevate love into “this kind of almost transcendental kind of mystical thing that is going to complete us and give us everything…and then you expect that from one person. I’m not sure that that bodes well, because I don’t know who can ever live up to that…”

Muslims and non-Muslims; those with assisted marriages and those with love marriages; those who swipe right on dating apps and those who engage professional matchmakers—all are more similar than different in Khan’s simmering meditation on the universality of one of life’s most essential pursuits. “I don’t have any solutions, just reflections,” says Khan. “Ultimately, regardless of the route you take to find love and what form it takes, it remains a universal preoccupation and a conundrum [that] transcends culture and religion.”