Deborah Ross

You’ve lost that loving feeling

Amma Asante’s new film is based on the greatest love story you never knew. But sadly, the filmmaking is simplistic and joyless

issue 26 November 2016

A United Kingdom is based on the greatest love story you probably didn’t have a clue about. I know I didn’t. It’s based on the true story of Seretse Khama, heir to the African kingdom of Bechuanaland (now Botswana), and Ruth Williams, a typist, who fell in love in 1940s London and married despite everyone and everything trying to separate them, including a vicious colonial British government. But this, sadly, is not the greatest film about the greatest love story you didn’t have a clue about. It’s OK. It does the job. It’s serviceable. It won’t be the biggest disappointment in your life. The story’s too good for it to get away completely. But it’s simplistic, exposition-heavy, joyless and focuses on the obstacles to their love rather than the love itself. I was begging throughout: come on, come on, give me something to feel.

The film is directed by Amma Asante (Belle) with a script by Guy Hibbert (Blood and Oil, Eye in the Sky) who, it has to be said, is not averse to cliché (‘You left as a boy and must return as a man’) or having people tell each other what they would surely already know.

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