TALENT IS WASTED
REVIEW: Mehboob Bawa
JAB HARRY MET SEJAL (When Harry Met Sejal). Directed by Imtiaz Ali.With Shah Rukh Khan,Anushka Sharma. At Nu Metro, Canal Walk, Ster-Kinekor, Cavendish Square. WRITER/director Imtiaz Ali’s normally on-point writing skills fail him in this love story that focuses on his favourite theme; troubled individuals finding their way in life and meeting their soulmate.
Despite beautiful locations, good music and a strong performance by Shah Rukh Khan, the wafer thin script and poor characterisation derails this romantic travelogue.
Ali is one of the most talented film-makers of a new era in Bollywood. He has successfully fused traditional song and dance with more serious and thought-provoking themes in films like Jab We Met, Love Aaj Kal, Rockstar, Highway and Tamasha.
His characters are often multi-dimensional, real people with challenges that audiences can relate to. But here he comes a cropper, offering a story based on the weakest of premises and characters that are completely underdeveloped.
Our hero, Harry, is a jaded tour guide based in Amsterdam, who specialises in taking Indian tourists around Europe.
He dislikes his well-off Indian clients as they are cheap and disrespectful.
Harry has issues and they are related to his having to leave his home in the Punjab area of India to make a living abroad.
This is a reality for many people, Indians included.
At the outset Harry seems an intriguing character with many layers but as the story unfolds and just when one thinks that you’ll get deeper into his psyche, you don’t.
Our heroine is insufferable. Poor Anushka Sharma tried hard to make something of the completely unlikeable Sejal, replete with a hard Gujarati accent, but there’s not much with which to work.
She is a lawyer and the daughter of a wealthy businessman who is in the jewellery trade.
Sejal is part of Harry’s last tour group who doesn’t leave as she has lost her engagement ring.
She insists that it is his duty to accompany her to find it. In fact she blackmails him to do so.
She is the epitome of the tourist that Harry dislikes intensely; loud, obnoxious, forceful, conniving, irritating… the list goes on.
Yet, at some point she kind of changes when she notices that Harry is obviously dealing with some issue.
In the scene in question, she offers to act as his girlfriend through the quest to find the ring.
They obviously develop feelings for each other. But why Harry would do so, when she flits from being caring to her true self, one cannot fathom.
They end up travelling from Amsterdam, which Sejal thinks is in France, to various scenic locations in Europe including Budapest, Prague, Lisbon, Frankfurt and others in search of the ring.
The manner in which the ring is found is illogical. There are characters they come across, including an Indian gangster and his goons who may have the ring.
While Khan milks these scenes for laughs, these characters are unnecessary and take up too much screen time of an over-long film.
At seven minutes short of two and a half hours, the pace drags at times and should have been edited more judiciously. KU Mohanan’s picture perfect cinematography is a great asset as are the beautiful cities he gets to showcase on screen.
The songs composed by Pritam are a treat. There are some elements which bring out the Ali of yore including a wonderfully choreographed music scene in a tram near the end of the film.
If only the rest of the film could have captured this type of dramatic intensity in such a subtle manner. But what we get for the most part is loud and frenetic.
While Ali may have lost his way here somewhat, his talented actors try their best with weak material. Khan comes off best, but Sharma just can’t cut it.
The inevitable coming together at the end is pure schmaltz and corny. There are scenes that work, but overall it’s a disappointment considering the level of talent involved.