Jab harry met sally…
iView Author: CRAZYRALS (Bangalore, India)
Email: crazyrals@gmail.com
Jab harry met sally…
.. ek ladka-ladki kabhi dost nahi hote… said Jeevan to Prem in
Maine Pyar Kiya. It was the year 1989 when MPK had released. I wished
to watch the movie in a cinema hall, but alas! I had no one to go
with. Anyhow, I finally got to see the movie on VCR some 3-4 months
later. There was very little action in the movie, one of them was
Salman Khan [Prem] doing a do-do haath with Mohnish Behl [Jeevan] .
Before Prem and Jeevan jumped into the duel, they had a small war of
words. Jeevan was spewing venom with his incisive words while
insinuating that something was definitely on between Prem and Suman
[Bhagyashree] and he uttered the historic dialogue: ek ladka-ladki
kabhi dost nahi hote.
Innocent that I was, I did not get the meaning of it back then. I
assumed that since they were eventually going to fall in love, where
was the need for being friends and even if they were friends why did
Prem feel so hurt. Anyways, I saw the movie quite a few times and was
thoroughly entertained everytime.
In the mid 90’s cable-tv was a rage and even we got it installed.
Movies were beaming 24×7 and on one such day I caught the movie ‘When
Harry Met Sally’ on Star Movies. Just 10 minutes into the movie and
Billy Crystal spoke those ominous words:You realize of course that we
could never be friends.
I went into a tizzy, what was Harry saying! Was he out of his mind.
Harry went onto explain:
Harry: You realize of course that we could never be friends.
Sally: Why not?
Harry: What I’m saying is — and this is not a come-on in any way,
shape or form — is that men and women can’t be friends because the sex
part always gets in the way.
Sally: That’s not true. I have a number of men friends and there is no
sex involved.
Harry: No you don’t.
Sally: Yes I do.
Harry: No you don’t.
Sally: Yes I do.
Harry: You only think you do.
Sally: You say I’m having sex with these men without my knowledge?
Harry: No, what I’m saying is they all want to have sex with you.
Sally: They do not.
Harry: Do too.
Sally: They do not.
Harry: Do too.
Sally: How do you know?
Harry: Because no man can be friends with a woman that he finds
attractive. He always wants to have sex with her.
Sally: So you’re saying that a man can be friends with a woman he
finds unattractive?
Harry: No, you pretty much want to nail ‘em too.
Sally: What if they don’t want to have sex with you?
Harry: Doesn’t matter because the sex thing is already out there so
the friendship is ultimately doomed and that is the end of the story.
Sally: Well, I guess we’re not going to be friends then.
And then it all came back to me. I understood why Prem and Suman could
not be friends. And I understood what Jeevan had implied.
I did a bit of research about the release of these two movies and much
to my surprise I found that both the movies released in 1989. While
WHMS had released in July, MPK had released in December. But howcome
two people in two different parts of the globe struck the same
concept. I am still perplexed how this happened, similar thought
pattern running in two different minds from two different cultures. Of
course, the Indian version was more subtle and needed some
deciphering.
Later on in the movie, after another 10 minutes of the previous
sequence Harry makes an ammendment to his earlier proposition. The
conversation between them goes like this:
Harry: Staying over?
Sally: Yes.
Harry: Would you like to have dinner?
Harry: Just friends.
Sally: I thought you didn’t believe men and women could be friends.
Harry: When did I say that?
Sally: On the ride to New York.
Harry: No no no no, I never said that. Yes, that’s right, they can’t
be friends. Unless both of them are involved with other people then
they can. This is an amendment to the earlier rule, if the two
people are in relationships, the pressure of possibilty of involvement
is lifted. That doesn’t work either because what happens then is the
person you’re involved with can’t understand why you need to be
friends with the person you’re just friends with. Like it means
something is missing from their relationship and “why do you have to
go outside to get it?”. Then when you say, “no no no no, it’s not
true nothing’s missing from the relationship”, the person you’re
involved with then accuses you of being secretly attracted to the
person you’re just friends with, which we probably are, I mean, come
on, who the hell are we kidding, let’s face it, which brings us back
to the earlier rule before the amendment which is men and
women can’t be friends, so where does that leave us?
Sally: Harry.
Harry: What?
Sally: Goodbye.
Harry: Oh, OK.
The thought that trigerred off this post was a sequence in the movie
‘Rab Ne…’ where we had a drunk Raj/Suri rambling to himself after
Bobby had passed-out, he said ‘ladka-ladki kabhi dost nahi hote’;
implying that sooner or later Taani would fall in love with Raj. And
so, the legend of Harry-Sally lives on.
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Very nice post. Keep ‘em coming…!!
hum tum also had a similar debate…
@Magik:hum-tum was a rehash of WHMS, hence did not mention it
Nice one dude……………..
Nice one crazyrals…one of the very witty rom-coms for me. Billy Crystal is simply awesome in his initial part.
Well most of my female friendships have been strictly platonic so far. And regarding this pyaar-dosti thingy, after Dil To Paagal Hai and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, i have just kept off it.
Yeah but i did like WHMS much more than Hum Tum, coz Meg Ryan is any day better compared to Rani M.
I watched Hum-Tum once long back. It was a decent adaptation minus songs & ending for me back then.My view might differ now. Of course Meg Ryan is any day better than Rani. Bollywood overdid pyaar-dosti stuff and killed it.
Well,the pyar dosti stuff came back again last year with some intelligent writing and sub plots in Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na.However my favourite among the “pyar ya dosti-confusion” is Kuch Kuch Hota Hai.
KKHH thrived on pyar-dosti. when i wrote the article initially i had put in KKHH but felt tat it wud digress. anyways, lemme put down what i had written abt KKHH. when miss.briganza asks her students to define love, rahul very cleverly says ki ‘pyar dosti hai, agar woh meri sab se acchi dost nahi ban sakti to main usse pyaar kar hi nahi sakta’. so, rahul had the entire thing planned. get close to tina, make her a best-friend [not just friend], propose and marry
The pyaar-dosti funda was good initially, because Hindi movies rarely explored that concept, of whether its possible for friends to fall in love. But right now i feel, it has reached its sell by date,considering that in real life relationships have undergone drastic changes. Yeah at most it might be important for bored teens, but not much for adults.
Why is Bollywood still stuck on pyr-dosti-fidelity stuff? I was wondering why the youngsters in Jaane Tu did not experiment with each other… And people called it a modern, young film…!!
JTJYN was certainly nothing great. During first half of 2008, barring couple of movies, the quality of the rest was pathetic, so it got all those rave reviews. And of course the fact that Aamir can right now sell anything.
I think Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikander was one movie, that really explored the pyaar-dosti funda well, without making too big a fuss about it.
Yes they can never be unless it’s what Billy says later OR orientation of either (or both) of them is towards same-sex, then they can be.
Talking about friendship, i think JJTWS and even RDB explored it nicely.But what really would be fun to watch, a movie in which a group of friends having inter connected love stories.
They tried something with the crappy Dostana, but it looked very very fake.