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Jab Harry Met Sejal: Film Review

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The new Shahrukh Khan and Anushka Sharma starrer seems to fall flat, despite boasting of Imitiaz Ali’s directing skills.

The audience is introduced to Harry as a tour guide in Amsterdam who drowns his loneliness in alcohol and casual sex. The character’s loneliness is depicted from different angles, with Khan traversing in a bus, drinking alone in a pub, and looking at a reflection of his self in the mirror with a song playing in the background. Enter Sejal (Anushka Sharma) outside an airport, forcing Harry to help find her lost engagement ring, which he is reluctant to do.

Ultimately he gives in, but later confesses to being a womaniser. It is quite clear that Harry is the one in control of everything from the start, and Sejal is just trying to enjoy her new-found freedom (being from a conservative Gujarati family and travelling Europe with a guy) by running into random, shady pubs And yet, she also emphasised that she is not one of ‘those’ women who leave their fiancés and run away with a ‘tour guide’. One thus begins to question Sejal’s statements when she tries to seduce Harry by pretending to run into him at a bar, with the sequence ending awkwardly in the two waking up next to each other next morning, when they start pouring their heart out about singing and the Radha song comes on.

The two characters are shown frolicking around Europe for a ring which quite easily could have been remade, given Sejal’s family business of diamonds and the amount she is paying Harry on a daily basis. That ring is ultimately found in Sejal’s. Moreover, Khan’s age is explicitly evident and the age gap between the lovers quite prominent. There isn’t a concrete story line as would be expected from Imitaz Ali. All one sees is the panoramic views of Prague, Budapest and Amsterdam in the background with flashbacks of Punjab in black and white, none of which render the audience with Harry’s past. Seeking a man’s validation on a woman’s body is a theme regressive and difficult to digest, coming from these actors. And Harry’s sudden ramblings in Punjabi in front of the tourists is just outright rude.

“Jab Harry met Sejal is the weakest film of Imitaz Ali,” as Anupama Chopra said, and indeed it demeans the filmmaker’s calibre and imagination (if any of it is left). The film is all sugar-coated and far from reality. It gets boring at certain intervals and one waits for this ordeal to be over. If you haven’t watched this film, giving it a miss won’t do any harm unless all you plan to watch are some European cities.

 

Prachi Mehra

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Image credits: Saavn

 

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