Released 30 years ago, has popular romcom When Harry met Sally stood the test of time? Photo / Supplied
Released 30 years ago, has popular romcom When Harry met Sally stood the test of time? Photo / Supplied
Released 30 years ago, When Harry Met Sally has been a constant backdrop to Times columnist Dolly Alderton's life, inspiring her romantic pursuits as well as her writing. She reflects on her love affair with Nora Ephron's movie classic.
There is a type of person I love more than anyother. It is the person who immediately knows what I mean when I talk about "the white man's overbite" in reference to a particular type of male dancing. Someone who doesn't need the phrase "I knew the way you know about a good melon" explaining to them. Who knows what "This stupid, wagon wheel, Roy Rogers, garage sale COFFEE TABLE" is in reference to, and who will happily ring me just to yelp "BABY FISH MOUTH!" down the phone. A person who thinks, like me, that When Harry Met Sally is the greatest film ever made.
I've encountered this type of person a number of times since I first watched the film in my teens. My best friend, Farly, is similarly devoted to it and, nearly two decades since we first watched it together, lines from the script still feature so heavily in our shared language that we've forgotten they were written by Nora Ephron. The first time I met my friend Sali, we threw random, out-of-context quotes from it back and forth as if we were playing verbal volleyball. In my early twenties I fell for a musician mostly because he had memorised the entire film from top to bottom. It has one of the most-quoted scripts of all time because, as its tribe of fanatics will tell you, not one line is spare. Every character is funny and wise, giving pithy observations and insightful one-liners as catchy as they are profound. And yet none of the dialogue feels mannered — it is addictively light and loose in exchanges you could listen to for ever.
For anyone unfamiliar with the film (remedy that immediately), the story centres on a young woman, Sally Albright, who meets a young man, Harry Burns, when they share a car journey after graduating from college. Their meeting gets off to a rocky start, particularly when Harry claims that they could never be friends; men and women can never be friends because "the sex part always gets in the way". They do, however, eventually hit it off and the majority of the story follows the pair in their early thirties — both out of long-term relationships and navigating single life — as they forge a close platonic bond.
There are a number of unique details that, over time, have made the film instantly recognisable. The story is chapter-marked by interviews with a selection of elderly couples talking about how they met. The transcripts for these scenes were collected by the director, Rob Reiner, from real life and then replayed by actors. From a couple who came together in an arranged marriage, to another who married, divorced and then married again, the interviews deepen the film's subtle but searching questions about men, women, friendship, marriage and long-term love.
The romantic jazz soundtrack matches the sophisticated Manhattan setting — shot on Ephron's beloved Upper West Side, in Central Park, in Katz's deli (there is now a sign marking the table where the infamous fake orgasm scene takes place — more on that later). There are nods to cinematic history throughout, perhaps in the genetic ink of the writer's pen (Ephron's parents were screenwriters whose credits include the Fred Astaire movie Daddy Long Legs and Carousel). Casablanca is a recurring theme, with Harry and Sally arguing over the meaning of its ending throughout the story. And there is a tribute to the 1959 Rock Hudson/Doris Day romcom Pillow Talk, with a split-screen four-way phone-call scene at the beginning of the film's third act. All these nostalgic touches imbue When Harry Met Sally with a timelessness that means, despite a few aesthetic giveaways of the 1980s, it doesn't feel like a period piece or distinctly of its time. I find it as relevant and astute now as it must have felt 30 years ago.
Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal star in When Harry Met Sally. Photo / Getty Images
Arguably the most memorable elements are its actors. Billy Crystal plays Harry — intense, cynical, charming and witty, with his signature Long Island accent as strong as the iced tea. Meg Ryan is Sally — sweet, open-hearted, romantic, ambitious and slightly controlling (Harry is both beguiled and infuriated by her hyper-pernickety ordering in restaurants). Another much-loved performance is Carrie Fisher as Sally's best friend, Marie. She plays a perennially single woman utterly obsessed with the science and strategy of tracking down Manhattan's remaining bachelors (she keeps a filing system of names that she updates when they get married or die), and yet is in total denial about her own romantic future by having an affair with a married man. A recurring exchange in the film is when she asks Sally, "He's never going to leave her, is he?" and Sally, with the recognisably firm but loving tone employed by female best friends the world over, replies, "Of course he isn't."
When Harry Met Sally is probably best known for its almost slapstick comedy set pieces. In one scene, Harry and Sally try out a karaoke machine while out shopping. Harry, midway through a camp, thigh-slapping performance of The Surrey with a Fringe on Top from Oklahoma!, spots his ex-wife, who approaches him with the man she left him for and they proceed to have a humiliating and awkward exchange. In another scene, Harry is telling his male best friend, Jess, all about his impending divorce at an American football match and they get caught up in a stadium Mexican wave, always heaving themselves up to stand at the most serious parts of the story.
But it is the fake orgasm sequence that will always be the film's defining moment. During lunch at a deli Sally tells Harry that most women "at one time or another" have faked an orgasm. Harry claims that no woman has ever faked an orgasm with him, because he would be able to tell. Sally, quietly infuriated by his arrogance, starts moaning and breathing heavily before culminating in a theatrical, screaming fake climax, while the whole restaurant watches in bewilderment. When she is done, she smiles smugly at Harry, knowing her point has been made, and eats a forkful of coleslaw. "I'll have what she's having," a nearby female customer says to the waiter. (Trivia: the woman was Rob Reiner's mother.)
The fake orgasm sequence will always be the film's defining moment. Photo / Supplied
The film contains almost as much sincerity and pain as it does flippancy and comedy — a hard-to-capture combination simultaneously. When Jess informs Harry that marriages "don't break up on account of infidelity — it's just a symptom that something else is wrong", Harry replies, "Oh really? Well, that symptom is f****** my wife." When Sally finds out her ex is getting married shortly after they have broken up (because he didn't want to get married and have children), she says, through breathless sobs: "All this time I've been saying that he didn't want to get married, but the truth is he didn't want to marry me." It is a line that always makes me cry, no matter how many times I hear it, as this realisation in the grief of a failed relationship is so unbearable, and one that so many of us have had to confront. It is this pitch-perfect, confidently balanced bittersweetness that defined Nora Ephron's work and that so many writers have tried to emulate since they first read her essays, journalism, memoir — or watched her films.
I often wonder whether When Harry Met Sally would be as well received if it was made now. The story's world is arguably limited — the characters are metropolitan and affluent; it focuses on middle-class preoccupations of what to order with apple pie or what to wear on a first date. Neuroses were a big interest in all of Ephron's writing — she was deeply influenced by the move towards psychological analysis in the 1970s. Perhaps a modern audience might find this level of urban overthinking too self-indulgent, or not sufficiently inclusive or urgent enough. But I believe that Ephron's observations on the male and female disposition are what make the film as essential as it is entertaining, and it is a universal commonality that can transcend class, country or generation. I'm certain a teenage girl in 2019 would roar with laughter in the same way I did when I first watched it.
Nora Ephron knew that men and women were different, and she wasn't afraid to observe the cultural, psychological, biological chasm between us. The film's premise came from conversations between Ephron and Reiner, who were real-life friends, about how and why men and women function the way they do. It is overflowing with the observant findings from those discussions on gender. Attitude to sex is one — Harry is easily able to sleep with a woman he didn't get on with on a first date; Sally is perplexed by this. Sally loves to be "held all night" postcoitally; Harry says that men lie awake in bed after sex, wondering: "How long do I have to lie here and hold her before I can get up and go home?" When they discuss the unfairness of the biological clock, Sally declares, "It's not the same for men, Charlie Chaplin had babies when he was 73!" and Harry quickly quips, "Yeah, but he was too old to pick them up." The crux of the film — the investigational purpose of this story — is the philosophical question of gender in and of itself: can men and women ever be just friends?
The movie builds to the most satisfying, tear-jerking, goosebump-raising finale of any romantic comedy, in which Harry realises he wants to spend the rest of his life with Sally and runs through the streets of New York to find her. (Eagle-eyed Girls fans might have noticed that Adam Driver's character did the same thing in the last scene of series two — Ephron was a mentor to Lena Dunham.) Harry finds Sally at a New Year's Eve party, declares his love for her and the two kiss. Undercutting the romance of this moment, Harry comments on the song Auld Lang Syne, saying he has never understood what it meant: "I mean, 'Should old acquaintance be forgot' — does that mean we should forget old acquaintances, or does it mean if we happen to forget them, we should remember them, which is not possible because we already forgot them?" Through a tearful smile, Sally replies: "It's about old friends." And in those four simple words, in that one simple sentiment, she summarises the heart of the film, the meaning of all those elderly couples on the sofa, and the secret to every successful romantic relationship.
