Meg Ryan was the reigning queen of romedies, or romantic comedies. Of course, she did dabble in other genres, but it was her star-making appearances in films like Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail and When Harry Met Sally that almost made her synonymous with the term — romantic comedy. Her blonde hair cut short and smart, Meg wore cosy, warm winter clothes as she discovered New York while bumping into Billy Crystal’s Harry over the years in the true treat that was When Harry Met Sally (1989).
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Meg’s Sally and Billy’s Harry are two college students who take a cross-country drive debating whether men and women can be friends. In Indian cinema, pyaar dosti hai, but in 80s-90s Hollywood, people were still wondering whether the strong emotional bond of friendship could ever stand the test of time between opposite sexes, without sex making things awkward, messy and hasty? While writer Nora Ephron’s lovely screenplay didn’t really resolve the discussion, both Harry and Sally predictably fell in love as they kept running into each other in various locations of the Big Apple.
The easy chemistry and charm of the leads; the evocative, witty writing of Ephron and filmmaker Rob Reiner’s direction fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, ticking boxes of the genre, all the while upgrading it. When Harry Met Sally has had several remakes or adaptations across the globe since then (here, Kunal Kohli’s Hum Tum was a very obvious nod), but it is its restaurant scene that has always been talked of, and now has pretty much gained the status of being iconic. At one point, in another one of their run-ins, when Meg’s sassy but vulnerable Sally and Billy’s Harry sit across from each other once again, it’s at a diner. The pair is discussing about women’s ability to fake orgasms. Sally thinks that nearly every woman has done it at least once in their life, while Harry disagrees, very confident in the fact that he has successfully been able to pleasure the women he’s been with.
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In the sequence, director Rob Reiner takes two human connections and does something magical with it. He mixes sex and laughter and the outcome is not crass, not serious, not flippant, but actually, really funny. To prove her point Sally suddenly stops further discussion with Harry about the subject, and begins acting like she’s experiencing an orgasm right then. Things get loud and people in the diner obviously start staring, but Sally is busy aiming for that Oscar. And she gets it; her act further elevated by her next simple reaction after her act is over: to take a bite of her coleslaw, like she had just not grabbed more eyeballs than were necessary. She wins, we laugh, and then an older lady (the director’s real-life mother no less), says, “I will have what she is having,” thus compounding the success of an already well-done bit ten-fold.
Speaking about the fake orgasm part, People magazine quoted Meg as saying, “Comedy of Sally is so behavioral, it’s not really so much talking. It’s doing. So it’s sort of really very logical. And it wasn’t hard.” At the film’s 30th anniversary celebration, filmmaker Reiner said the line his mother spoke was an addition done by Billy Crystal.
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“Billy, he added the biggest laugh in the movie, which is the biggest laugh in any movie I’ve ever been involved with. ‘I’ll have what she’s having.’ My mother says that line. Meg said, ‘Well, I’ll do it! I’ll just actually act it (orgasm) out, we don’t have to talk about it, I’ll just do it. And in a restaurant! Something big! Some place,’ as Crystal added, ‘And then you’ll cut to a woman who will say I’ll have what she’s having!’ We all laughed,” concluded the director. And what a laugh they had, as the movie ended up being nominated for an Oscar and a BAFTA, and coughed up over 90 million dollars at the North American box office alone.