“Rob Reiner directs with sympathy for both main characters”: When Harry Met Sally reviewed in 1989

The recent Hollywood revival of romantic and screwball comedies with their will-they/ won’t-they deferral of consummation narratives smacks of contemporary sexual angst. When Harry Met Sally consciously takes its cue from the couple-in-crisis comedies of an earlier period of sexual upheaval, in the split-screen telephone conversations recalling Pillow Talk, for instance, and in its playing off the hero’s cynical world view against the heroine’s almost hysterical positive attitude to everything. This playful nostalgia is certainly part of the film’s appeal, although When Harry Met Sally is more 80s than 60s: a certain melancholy overshadows both its humour and its romanticism.

Harry’s lugubrious reflections on the disastrous outcome of human intercourse, and his insistence that men and women cannot have sex and be friends, jostle with documentary-style tableaux in which aged couples testify to the enduring power of love. These scenes punctuate Harry and Sally’s intermittent encounters, which are often brief and transitory, taking place on journeys or in autumn and winter settings. Their edgy, awkward interactions, splendidly played by Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal, are always out of sync with the ‘normal’ activities enjoyed by other couples, on New Year’s Eve, for example, or at friends’ dinner parties. The film harks back to classic Hollywood movies to demonstrate that the age of the romantic couple is over: the ending of Casablanca is a constant bone of contention between Harry and Sally, she claiming that Ingrid Bergman made the right choice, he insisting that it proves the impossibility of love between men and women surviving; and their painfully funny off-key rendition of “Surrey with the Fringe on Top” from Oklahoma!, while shopping for friends’ wedding presents, precedes the devastating moment when Harry meets his ex-wife and her lover.

There is also a poignantly contemporary hue to the film’s treatment of sex and sexual relationships. When Harry and Sally finally go to bed with one another, the moral issue is not one of sexual transgression but of how to behave now they have broken the codes of their friendship. Harry’s characteristic reaction, based on cowardice, is to run away and pretend nothing has happened. Indeed, it is mostly Harry’s behaviour which has to change before their relationship can progress, and it is this ‘lesson’ that finally makes the film as much a comedy for the Personal Growth generation as one at its expense (compared, say, to After Hours). Rob Reiner directs in an intimate TV style, and with evident sympathy for both main characters (the script is partly based on his own experiences). Nora Ephron’s acerbic touch is evident in a few well-aimed jibes: the couple’s eventual reconciliation, in which his declaration “I love you” is returned by “I hate you” from her, goes against the grain of the happy ending, while Meg Ryan pulls off a tour de force in the sequence in which Sally demonstrates for Harry in a crowded restaurant what a fake orgasm sounds like. Why fake orgasms should even exist is the awkward question lurking beneath this film’s lighthearted veneer.