I always lament that we don’t have more English-speaking rom-coms with a South Asian female lead. Off the top of my head, the ones that come to mind are Bend It Like Beckham, Bride and Prejudice and The Broken Hearts Gallery. So I rejoiced when I found out that Simone Ashley was going to be the lead in a rom-com, which led to my utter woe when I watched it and realised that it wasn’t good. This isn’t because of Ashley, who is fantastic as usual, bringing the right spirit and energy to the role. The issue is the screenplay, which is bland, run-off-the-mill and has way too many butt jokes for some reason.
Ashley plays Pia, a photographer who runs her own studio called the Ninth Mandala. Business, however, is not booming, as she keeps doing things pro bono and doesn’t want to do basic things that would keep a photography business going, like passport photos. The only man Pia’s ever loved, Charlie (Hero Fiennes Tiffin, who looks like he’s been held against his will to be in this movie), is the best man to her sister Sonal’s (Anoushka Chadha) soon-to-be husband Sam (Eben Figueiredo), so their engagement party brings Charlie back into her orbit again.
After seeing that Charlie has moved on, Pia decides she should too, and gets her family to arrange a bunch of blind dates for her. Cue the series of bad date set pieces, like Pia stuffing a toilet full of toilet paper for some bizarre reason and clogging it as a result, or Pia having to administer an epi pen after giving her date a brownie with nuts. Anyone who has allergies would know to ask if the food item has nuts, especially when it’s something like a brownie which are known to have nuts. Pia’s so kooky she sets her hair on fire at one point.
What bothers me the most is the music in the film – it’s so random and feels like someone downloaded tons of royalty-free music and used that to score the movie. Music needs to be cohesive and what’s present here is so jarring it took me out of so many of the scenes. Indian weddings are also loud, bright, colourful, but we get none of that in the celebratory scenes that unfold. It’s like the movie’s always trying to hide that they don’t have that many extras to actually fill the space.
Ashley and Tiffin don’t have much chemistry together either – he’s tight-jawed for most of their scenes, and she’s avoidant, so there’s nothing there for us viewers to even see a glimpse of what could’ve been. Having random characters pop out and tell us they would make an amazing couple isn’t how a rom-com works.
In You’ve Got Mail, Kathleen’s bookstore actually goes out of business despite her plucky ways and every attempt to stop it from happening. Because that’s reality. All the desire and love in the world can’t stop bad things from happening. Pia is going through the same thing with her studio, and what is especially annoying is that she does nothing to stop it from happening and yet it gets saved. She doesn’t even do the party favours she promised her sister, yet she gets credit for it.
As escapist as rom-coms can be, all the machinations that surround Pia makes her feel unreal, a character generated by algorithm to satiate the need for content instead of the art Pia preaches about. Like Pia says, any form of art needs to build on a relationship, a conversation that speaks to us. All I get from Picture This is how incredible Simone Ashley is, and how she deserves better than this lackluster rom-com vehicle.
REVIEW SCORE – 2/5
