‘Picture This’ REVIEW: Picture a good romcom — it isn't this
‘Picture This’ REVIEW: Picture a good romcom — it isn’t this
Simone Ashley plays a photographer at a personal and professional crossroads in her life | Amazon Prime Video
A fiercely independent woman, who runs a small business starting to go under, attends her sister’s engagement party. There, she is coerced by friends and family to go on five blind dates based on the predictions of a fortune teller who says that her personal and professional lives are intertwined, and that one of the next five people she will meet will be her true love. But what if the love that she had been waiting for was not of the future, but a remnant of her past all along?
If the plot sounds familiar, that’s because it’s been done before. Picture This is based on the 2024 romcom Five Blind Dates (also a Prime Video original), trading in a failing artisanal tea shop for a failing photography studio, the Chinese-Australian experience for the cultural traditions of the British-Indian diaspora, and outright awfulness for —- slightly better but also disappointing — mediocrity.
Picture This, though blessed with Simone Ashley of Bridgerton fame as its extremely charming and veritably dedicated leading lady, does not do much to separate itself from the rest of the streaming slop crop, as it retains the same generic digital sheen, headache-inducing editing (get ready to see more split screens than a Brian de Palma movie), and a feather-faint outline of what constitutes actual comedy. To expound on the latter: there are many scenes that hinge on indefinite outlines of slapstick humor, like an overflowing toilet or a severe nut allergy, but just as it was in Anyone But You (another modern rom-com that I heavily dislike), what could have been filled with witty, snappy scenes of character-revealing dialogue is replaced with broadly “funny” situations that eat up space and seem more suited to a cartoon than a romantic comedy.
Even the scenes meant to showcase quick wit are unmemorable, each one a blanket of Internet terms and #relatable musings with no sense of specificity. It doesn’t help that a lot of these comedic scenes are poorly paced, with a kind of stop-and-halt momentum that makes one’s neck ache with figurative whiplash.
Simone Ashley and Hero Fiennes Tiffin play exes on the verge of rekindling a flame it’s hard to believe was ever there | Amazon Prime Video
If the com of this rom-com is not up my alley, then what of the rom? Believe it or not, the state of it is even more dire. Enter Charlie: “the one that got away”, the boy too simple for the girl’s big dreams, the sensible option compared to a zany lineup that includes an air-headed flat-earther, a wealthy egomaniac, and an actual nice guy who would be perfect if he weren’t in love with Pia’s mother. Charlie is utterly, mind-numbingly boring — a leading man with no leading man qualities, a supposed foil to Pia’s personality who is missing any semblance of said personality. In the sparse handful of scenes he is in, he is only there to reminisce with Pia on the good ol’ days of their past relationship or be jealous of any other man she vaguely welcomes into her orbit.
He is a character on the sidelines who does not seem to service Pia’s supposed growth and only seems to regress it. Hero Fienes Tiffin’s stiff performance, compared with Ashley’s spirited own, does not help matters. At no point in their scarce, acutely uninteresting interactions is there any spark, a moment of potent chemistry, or a revelation in the midst of banter as to why they are perfect for each other. For the main couple of a movie heavily marketed as a rom-com, this is deeply disappointing to see.
The existence of Charlie, however, is not an isolated incident. He is just one of the many products of the script’s difficulty in presenting actual well-drawn characters. The aforementioned zany dates are just that: zany. They are there for comedic effect; they can’t even bother to pretend to be indicators of what Pia doesn’t look for in a relationship, because their negative qualities are so over-the-top that anyone, not just Pia, would be running in the other direction. Even Pia herself is difficult to pin down. Ashley, as I said, does her absolute best to bring life to her character, but in the end, she is nothing but a well of unclear motivations and contradictions that make her difficult to root for. Is she truly rebellious? Does she actually wish for a quiet life? Who knows? Does it matter when her being is an echo of more vividly realized rom-com leading ladies?
Pia with her mother (Sindhu Vee) and extended family | Amazon Prime Video
The rest of the people in Pia’s life don’t fare any better in terms of development. Pia’s younger sister Sonal (Anoushka Chadha), whose month-long wedding festivities are the backdrop of the story, doesn’t have a lot of material outside of her bubbliness and brightness. She’s shown as being the complete opposite of Pia’s scrappier personality, but the sisters don’t get a lot of time alone to establish their connection. Pia’s parents Laxmi (Sindhu Vee) and Mukul (Adil Ray), who have only disclosed their divorce to a few people to keep up appearances within their extended family, bear traits and spout platitudes of a typical overbearing family.
Only when all is said and done, does Pia actually get to have quality heart-to-heart time with each of her family members, almost as if the movie remembered at the last minute to establish the importance of Pia’s family in her life, and to at least pose a believable reason as to why she gives in to the whole five dates shindig that seems so against her own personal values.
In addition, self-proclaimed “gay bestie” Jay is a regrettable repeat of the most irritating markers of the Gay Best Friend trope. He takes up so much of the screen time to only be two things: gay and a best friend. He is actually the funniest of the cast of characters (hugely due to Luke Fetherston’s comedic timing), but his witty remarks only act as band-aids to offset any inevitable dullness. Further dialogue and backstory related to Jay are firmly attached to his sexuality, with his actual hobbies and passions, minus Pia’s own happiness, left unknown and unexplored. He is always there when she needs him. Hell, it’s even mentioned that he works at the photography studio basically for free! Jay’s unwavering devotion, without any proper backstory as to why he and Pia are so close, then becomes completely unbelievable.
Luke Fetherston (Jay) does the best he can with the material he’s given | Amazon Prime Video
I dedicate a large paragraph to him, because it was the handling of his character that was the last straw to top off my steadily mounting frustrations with the film. It was at his one hundredth line of dialogue completely connected to furthering Pia’s growth that I started to daydream of rewatching other superior rom-coms. I could have been watching Rye Lane, which handled the British cultural diaspora and its central romance much more effectively. I could have been watching Bridget Jones’s Diary, a romcom with a flawed female character whose lack of coordination was an actual trait of hers and not an excuse for out-of-character scenes of humor. I could have been watching My Best Friend’s Wedding, whose Gay Best Friend character George so clearly leads a life separate from the main character’s own.
When you start thinking of other movies you could be seeing in place of the movie you are currently watching, then there’s a problem, sometimes to do with the viewer. However, it’s not exactly like Picture This is innocent, as it deliberately and unashamedly evokes every rom-com that has come before it. The spine it has built for itself coasts on pure assumption. It assumes that just because it has covered all the base tropes of almost every single romantic comedy that’s ever been — the overbearing family, the gay best friend, the strong independent woman who needs no man until she does — that it is exempt from the effort to separate itself from the flock. Its showcasing of Indian culture, like the wedding dances and the use of Janampatri, an astrological chart, is admirable, but that is not what is supposed to be the sole carrier of the movie’s uniqueness.
The characters in a romcom have to be real, lived-in, and easy to root for in spite of all their imperfections. The comedy in a rom-com should be clever and natural, not overly silly and manufactured. The romance in a rom-com should be, first and foremost, undeniably visible and a strong indicator of the growth experienced by two characters. Picture This may still be enjoyable for some who are looking for a light and breezy movie to watch on a Friday night, but that’s only if you lower your standards and settle for a film that gives you a vague outline of a feeling rather than the unadulterated whole of it.
Picture This is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
