Director: Imtiaz Ali
Rating: **
If we go by the name Jab Harry Met Sejal, we can assume it that it could be like greatest Hollywood romances ever, "When Harry Met Sally" but it's the just the title which is similar to that, otherwise it has nothing similar to that. 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, barring the chemistry between the lead stars, that is precisely what this film amounts to: nothing. That `nothing` about which `much ado` was made in one of Shakespeare's most famous works.
Shah Rukh Khan here plays Harry a.k.a. Harinder 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 traveled 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.
Jab Harry Met Sejal is a lost cause from the word go. Sejal's reasons for staying back, 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.
The story is peppered with so many songs that you lose count of them after a while. And stop caring. Harry and Sejal break into Main Bani Teri Radha when the sun rises. Before the sun is even visible on the horizon, you have them singing Hawayein. And then we move to yet another song from Pritam Music Manufacturers Pvt Ltd, where you can order in bulk.
Imtiaz Ali has made this much-awaited movie of Shahrukh and Anushka, a lengthy, lumbering, a baggy and pointless love story. As lengthy and lumbering as his earlier "Tamasha" where two grown-up individuals behaved like a bratty unpleasant couple on a reality show pretending to be people, they were not.
Imtiaz Ali has been repeatedly remaking his first film "Socha Na Tha" in various geo-political and socio-cultural permutations, exploring the gender dynamics in relationships where the woman is aggressively self-assertive while the man careens between self-loathing and borderline misogyny that comes from a broken heart or excessive sex.
The beautiful locations are obviously eye-catching, but surely surface gloss, star power, lively music and sparkling cinematography can never turn a patchy and whimsical film into a convincing romantic drama about a pair of strangers thirsting for more than what their lives have offered them thus far.
Harry is in search of true love. Sejal, too, is on a voyage of discovery. Do they get what they are looking for? Not a chance in hell. So flabby is this flighty film that it moves only in hops and skips. It never really gets off the ground.
Jab Harry Met Sejal is cinema's equivalent of a shiny bauble that glitters wholly in vain. Watch it only if you fancy a vicarious romp through Europe with a megastar trying hard to get going.
