Jab Harry met Sejal: Love, fun & humour SRK style
Cast : Shah Rukh Khan, Anushka Sharma, Sayani Gupta, Evelyn Sharma, Chandan Roy Sanyal, Aru Krishansh Verma, Paras Arora
Rated: 7/10
Jab Harry Met Sejal, he had become a veteran of romance — been there, done that in much peppier love stories down the years since Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge made him the king of romance in 1995.
So, somewhat aged for the emotion, in love with a bubbly young girl, teaching her the mores of attraction in a veteran kind of way and yet getting swayed by her impromptu, completely untailored attraction will have the critics ready with their stones. And yes, there is also this matter of a lot of the annoying facial hair that Shah Rukh Kahn (SRK) has been sporting to look his age which is 50 plus I am told?
But alongside come a host of vintage mannerisms which have SRK written all over them — vintage SRK, not over the top SRK mind you — and that’s what Harry and this movie by gifted director Imtiaz Ali is all about.
Yes, you could say that Imtiaz is not really on the top of his job in this one, ie, he might have made it in his silly season and in a holiday mood. But it is still a heartbeat, a humour-infused, genuine Harry Met Sallytype of a fluffy film with all the trappings of a wholesome European tour along the way to keep the scenes urgent and the scenarios changing in a story that is seemingly stuck to the monotonous job of the lead pair trying to find a lost ring!
As a tourist guide, with some unexplained Punjab da puttar hang-ups which spur his existential issues, Harry is someone most girls may not instantly fall for but would be drawn to inexorably. Somewhat aloof but extremely witty, a man of the world, seemingly chivalrous but actually a “ganda, cheap type man’, knowing how to keep the tourists engaged, looking after their needs and being there with a smile always — you don’t get those kind anymore, do you?
The good thing about SRK in this one is that he is not in the hyperactive kkkkkiran mode but self-assuredly sitting on his past laurels to give you a relaxed, genuine, fun loving, humorous and of course insanely romantic SRK film.
Forced to escort a Gujju girl on a ring quest, he peps up the movie with that Koffee With Karan kind of candid couch humour and does not mind being the elder in the relationship.
Sejal, on the other hand, played by a breeze called Anushka Sharma, holds forth as the other engaging character in the film. As a bubbly, heavily but rightly accented Gujju girl who happens to be a lawyer of sorts from a diamond merchant family of Surat, she is virtually faultless.
To hold her own, and even manage to overshadow SRK at places in his home production, is a task much more daunting than searching for a lost ring in restaurants, hotels and alley ways of eight European countries. But romance brews. Thanks to Imtiaz it does so in a hatke, casual but real kind of way, the film taking you into that ‘awww so romantic’ mode even as you laugh along the situations stitched together with SRK at helm. That’s a cool thing wouldn’t you say from an industry turning bankrupt in the romance genre after Yash Raj Chopra passed away?
The only spoiler, besides that facial hair? The film is somewhat stretched towards the end, especially when it takes 10 minutes to unfold in Punjab YRF style and then ends like a hanger suddenly. Remember, the credit cameos in Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi? Something like that may have been unoriginal but engaging nevertheless. On the whole, go for Harry, go for Sejal and definitely go for SRK’s brand of a crazy little thing called love.
Source: Sunday Pioneer, 6 August, 2017