A film with few genuinely memorable moments Jab Harry Met Sejal
Director: Imtiaz Ali Starring: Shah Rukh Khan and Anushka Sharma If the flop- ridden Hindi Fun, no? film industry had its hopes Well, no. Not really. Shah pinned on the new Shah Rukh’s Harry, with his unRukh Khan starrer for salabashed cheesiness and vation, then it’s time to unpin “cheapness”, plays his part those hopes. with an arrogant aplomb
Imtiaz Ali’s eagerly awaitthat seems borrowed from ed Jab Harry Met Sejal is a his superstar persona of lengthy, lumbering, baggy Aryan Khanna in Maneesh and pointless love story. As Sharma’s Fan. Here is a man lengthy and lumbering as his who will do what he wants, earlier Tamasha where two say what he wishes and apgrown-up individuals beply any logic no matter how haved like a bratty unpleaspolitically indecorous, to ant couple on a reality show prove his point. pretending to be people they And we are meant to listen were not. in, because... well, it is Shah
Just imagine if Ranbir Rukh Khan. Anushka SharKapoor and Deepika Paduma, showing an impreskone met again in an exotic sive ability to stay calm and land and decided to play.... still while her co-star lets ummm... a cranky closetoff spleen all over the place, misogynist tourist guide and does a good of job trying to a fast-taking vacuous but make some sense of her cocharming Gujarati tourist. star’s tantrums. Frankly, Sejal has more patience than we do.
It’s hard for us to tolerate her mulish determination and his cynical deportment. These two are made for each other. Our best wishes.
Imtiaz Ali has been repeatedly remaking his first film Socha Na Tha in various geopolitical 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. As they travel across Europe looking for Sejal’s missing ring (why is the ring so vital to her life?), Harry insists in telling her he has been... errr... sleeping around, that he is cheap and he just may make her a target of his cheapness. Sejal, who couldn’t care less to begin with, soon begins to enjoy the thought of being given more a passing excursion into unknown lands by her rude tourist guide.
Their well-lit bristling and borderline-sexy conversations in exotic hotel rooms (well done, KU Mohanan) reminded me of Kareena Kapoor(then without the “Khan”) and Shahid Kapoor’s vivacious banter in Imtiaz Ali’s still-outstanding Jab We Met.
What followed was a sellout. In Imtiaz’s earlier films, the couple explored the Indian hinterland in pursuit of an emotional and spiritual identity. Rockstar onwards, they began travelling to exotic foreign locations for no other reason except that the director could afford them.
Jab Harry Met Sejal is all over the place, literally. It takes us to Prague, Budapest and what-not. But fails to justify its roving eye. The emotional journey is just as messy and unconvincing. It’s hard for the audience to invest their emotions in these two self- absorbed cynics who think travelling together is a sign from above for an incongruous bumpy togetherness filled with rage and, yes, atonal songs lip-synced so indifferently by Shah Rukh as though to tell us, “Look, guys, I know and you know that I am not really singing these songs.”
The same sort of freewheel- ing flippancy is applied to the ersatz emotions that spill out through dialogues which impose a mellowness and maturity on what is essentially romantic raillery between two high school students, one of whom is rich arrogant and stubborn, and the other is arrogant and stubborn no matter what his social standing, because, well, he is Shah Rukh Khan.
Jab Harry Met Sejal has a few genuinely “cool” encounters between the lovers. But these are too spaced out and too far in-between to engage us in the couple’s destined marriage. What clutters the corridors of this posh-looking touristic vilaayat-darshan are the winking flirty exchanges which lead nowhere. IANS