|
Release date:
|
August 4, 2017
|
|
Director:
|
Imtiaz Ali
|
|
Cast:
Language:
|
Shah Rukh Khan,
Anushka Sharma, Chandan Roy Sanyal, Aru K. Verma
Hindi
|
Jab Harry Met Sejal is not When Harry Met Sally. With its bow to
one of the greatest Hollywood romances ever made, the title of Imtiaz Ali’s new
release seemed to suggest that his film would be not a mere romance but a
conversation on the very meaning of love, attraction and the whole shebang that
goes with it.
Maybe instead Ali
should have opted for the name Much Ado
About Harry and Sejal. Because, with due apologies to Bill Shakespeare, barring
the chemistry between the lead stars, this is precisely what the film amounts
to: nothing. The “nothing” about which “much ado”
was made in one of Shakespeare’s most famous works.
Shah Rukh Khan here
plays Harry a.k.a. Harindar Singh Nehra, a Punjab-born, Canadian passport-holding
tour guide in Europe who is forced to accompany Sejal Zhaveri (Anushka Sharma) on
a trans-continental search for her lost engagement ring. Harry had been
assigned to her group – consisting of her family and friends – as they
travelled across Europe for a month, when her boyfriend Rupen proposed marriage
to her, and slipped that ring on her finger. She promptly misplaced it. Rupen sees
her carelessness as an indicator of her lack of commitment, so she decides to
stay back, find it in the haystack that is Europe and prove to him how much she
loves him.
Obviously, this gives Ali the
opportunity to combine his two favourite cinematic genres, the road movie and
the romance. The locations (Amsterdam, Prague,
Budapest, Lisbon and Frankfurt) are picturesque, of course, and cinematographer
K.U. Mohanan delivers on the visuals. The same
cannot be said of Ali’s writing of his characters’ motivations.
Jab Harry Met Sejal is a lost cause
from the word go. Sejal’s reasons for staying on
in Europe, her pile-on behaviour, Harry’s back
story, her carelessness as she wanders lonely streets and darkened nightclubs
in alien lands – none of it is credible and frankly, neither Sharma nor Khan
appears convinced of why Sejal and Harry do what they do.
Sejal keeps
insisting she is devoted to Rupen yet also keeps pushing Harry to admit that
she is f**kable (the euphemism she uses is “laayak”,
the Hindi word for “worthy”, I kid you not). The pressing question that should
have kept a film like this going is: do they get together in the end?
The truth though is, that within about 30 minutes of Harry-Sejal’s running time, I did not give a damn.
It is hard to
believe that the man who made such thinking entertainers as Jab We Met and Tamasha has created this boring film. Worse, through Sejal’s
teasing ways, her stupidity and a troubling conversation she has with Harry’s ex-girlfriend
Clara in Frankfurt, Ali seems to be quietly making a rather disturbing point
about the meaning of consent in sexual relations, women who – as the prejudice
goes – ‘ask for it’, women who cry rape after ‘asking for it’ and so on.
Perhaps this should
not come as a surprise considering that, although some of his heroines have been
strong women, the writer-director did, after all, come up with a very
problematic man-woman relationship in Rockstar, and has casually featured rape jokes in both Rockstar and Jab We Met.
As Harry and Sejal
wade through philosophical bullshit about finding oneself, finding the one you
are meant to be with and so on, Jab Harry
Met Sejal gets more exasperating with each passing minute. There is a
fantastic Indian word for pretentious art of this kind: pakau.
I honestly wanted
the film to end when just 45 minutes had passed…
…But it did not.
…It lasted for 99
minutes thereafter.
…Yes it did.
In the midst of all
this pointlessness, SRK and Sharma’s torrid chemistry is the only thing that
kept me from falling off to sleep in the second half of Harry-Sejal. Although she is young enough to be his daughter
(seriously SRK, why are you doing this?), in a scenario where male stars tend
to want to act with women half their age, I would rather see these two together
than Khan with any of the other 20- or 30-somethings in the industry.
He is getting
hotter with age, she has infectious verve and the charisma to match him pop for
pop, crackle for crackle, spark for spark. Harry-Sejal’s
premise is beyond jaded, but the Sharma-Khan on-screen equation is so sizzling,
that I cannot remember the last time I wanted to see a couple have sex in a
film as much as I wanted to see this pair get down and dirty.
So do they? Well, if
you are willing to subject yourself to Ali’s mind-numbing take on the
definition of a soulmate (no doubt that is what Harry-Sejal fancies itself to be), then you will find the answer
for yourself.
The only other
positives I can think of in Jab Harry Met
Sejal are Hitesh Sonik’s pretty background score and the pizzazz in
Pritam’s songs, especially Main banoo
teri Radha. After a while though, even that is not enough and in fact, it feels
like there are just too many numbers packed into the film.
Jab Harry Met Sejal is occasionally funny, but
not half as funny or cute or ruminative as it clearly thinks it is. Hats off to
Shah Rukh Khan and Anushka Sharma for managing to raise the Centigrades in this otherwise pakau disaster.
Rating
(out of five stars): *
|
CBFC Rating (India):
|
UA
|
|
Running time:
|
144 minutes
|
This
review has also been published on Firstpost:
No comments:
Post a Comment