When Har­ry Met Sal­ly… (1989)

We all have blind spots, both when it comes to cin­e­ma and love. After some­one new enters your life, these omis­sions can be revealed in stun­ning fash­ion. So goes my expe­ri­ence with Nora Ephron and Rob Reiner’s won­der­ful­ly alive and break­neck rom-com When Har­ry Met Sal­ly…. Much to the cha­grin of my new per­son, I’d nev­er seen this icon­ic, game-chang­ing genre film. ​“How is that pos­si­ble?” she asked with the same stal­wart per­sis­tence as Meg Ryan’s Sal­ly. I was speech­less, very unlike Bil­ly Crystal’s ver­bose splat­ter gun of a char­ac­ter, Harry.

The film con­sid­ers truth bombs cou­ples will inevitably be argu­ing about until the end of time. Can men tru­ly be pla­ton­ic friends with women? Who does Ingrid Bergman real­ly choose at the end of Casablan­ca? Why didn’t Bruno Kir­by and Car­rie Fish­er star in their own roman­tic com­e­dy spin­off? Except the film itself is more about the life­long pur­suit of har­mo­ny. We see that it is indeed pos­si­ble when Rein­er cuts away from his pro­tag­o­nists to hap­py elder­ly love birds direct­ly address­ing the camera.

Ephron’s play­ful and ser­pen­tine script high­lights the con­tra­dic­tions of romance, specif­i­cal­ly the messi­ness of con­ver­sa­tions between men and women. In the open­ing sequence, Har­ry and Sal­ly are intro­duced for the first time in col­lege imme­di­ate­ly before they car­pool togeth­er from Chica­go to New York City. Both are begin­ning anew in the Big Apple, yet each is already set in their ways. Pre­dictably, they don’t get along. Years lat­er, fate inter­venes and Har­ry meets Sal­ly again, and then again at var­i­ous stages in their lives. Even­tu­al­ly a friend­ship devel­ops and genre con­ven­tions kick into high gear. He said, she said, and around we go. It’s all been done a mil­lion times since the film’s release in 1989, but nev­er this well.

Rein­er plays down the flash, util­is­ing longer takes to allow the actors plen­ty of room to rev­el in Ephron’s words. There is one zany split screen sequence involv­ing all four key char­ac­ters that rede­fines the def­i­n­i­tion of pil­low talk. It stands out as one of the film’s few pure­ly stylised moments. From a per­for­mance angle, Ryan’s feels like a vul­ner­a­ble pre­cur­sor to her lat­er roles in Sleep­less in Seat­tle and You’ve Got Mail, while Crys­tal toes the line between cyn­ic and roman­tic with arro­gant glee.

Har­ry and Sally’s long-ges­tat­ing rela­tion­ship is lit­tered with mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tions and per­son­al jabs. These add up over the years, some­times result­ing in uncom­fort­able and fun­ny out­bursts, the most famous of which involves a par­tic­u­lar­ly loud lunch date. But the film’s explo­ration of human com­pro­mise seems most rev­o­lu­tion­ary now. Con­sid­er­ing its sub­tle treat­ment of time pass­ing and peo­ple chang­ing, When Har­ry Met Sal­ly… might not imme­di­ate­ly seem grand, but it’s one of the few epics in the roman­tic com­e­dy genre.

Still, each moment feels unique­ly inti­mate, lived-in, and effu­sive. The char­ac­ters them­selves don’t imme­di­ate­ly sense the chem­istry they share, but the audi­ence cer­tain­ly does. Love at first sight takes a long time. The trou­ble with Har­ry and Sal­ly is they don’t always realise this, instead deny­ing their feel­ings out of unease or doubt. One final truth bomb: Erase the fear and only then can ​“hap­pi­ly ever after” final­ly begin.