Jab Harry Met Sejal - Gone with the ring



In today’s aspirational world, Imtiaz Ali relies on a tour of Europe to mesmerise the audience shelling out big bucks to watch a 150-minute monotonous fare on screen. That it lacks a story, screenplay, good music, quality acting and logic appears immaterial to the filmmaker whose last few movies have certainly dented his reputation as a storyteller.

In Jab Harry Met Sejal, Anushka Sharma wants two things: Her engagement ring that she’s misplaced on her European sojourn and an acknowledgement from a rank stranger, her tour guide (Shah Rukh Khan, who has not offered anything new since his past innumerable outings), that she is not just a sweet, simple girl, but an attractive one who will have boys running after her. She stays back in Europe sans her family and goes on a wild goose chase in search of a ring at all the places that she had visited, with Khan for company. Amid all this, her only contact with her (conservative?) Gujarati family is via Skype with her sister (her parents are nowhere in the picture, while her fiancé who is supposedly upset with her for losing the ring only makes a brief appearance toward the end of the movie). We have to take it for granted that she is jobless with nobody to answer to (it’s only later that we realise that she comes from a business family, but that’s about it).

Forced to tag along against his wishes, Khan, a self-proclaimed womaniser, gives Sharma company, fights goons along the way, sings innumerable (unnecessary) songs and helps her discover the ‘real’ person hiding within her. Surprisingly, there are no travel assignments coming his way during this period and we are supposed to assume that he survives on thin air. Unsurprisingly, they fall in love with each other by the time the ring is found (by which time your head goes round and round). Both of them now have too much bag-gage to deal with and even though they don’t want to, decide to go separate ways.

What happens next can be easily predicted if you’re an ardent movie watcher. Khan flies to India just in time for Sharma’s wedding, which she has naturally called off. (If this sounds bizarre, wait till you see her waiting alone at the same venue because she knows he’ll be there.) They kiss right there and finally profess their love for each other. The end? No. There’s more. Khan then goes to his ancestral home in Punjab, all teary-eyed, sits on a tractor and sings the Butterfly song in the fields with Sharma. (I wish there was something that could make the audience fly out of the theatre by now.) The restless audience heaves a collective sigh of relief when the screen goes blank to suggest that the movie has finally ended.

Ali has lost the plot more than once now. Khan is still stuck in the 1990s even though Indian cinema has moved ahead by leaps and bounds. Sharma is the only saving grace (along with the Radha song) even though her Gujarati accent gets to you after a point. For someone with the kind of potential that she has shown as an actor over the years, she is wasted in such below-par films.

Jab Harry Met Sejal is boring, a different kind of suffering, with nothing to write home about. 

- Kunal Purandare 

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