Rom-Coms: WHMS v/s Jab We Met

The romantics have naysaid their hobby to be a tragedy. How they meet the “someone somewhere made for them” and then Cupid conjures the sorcery of separation. This is the moniker of traditional romantic sagas. Tough on the heart and over the head, these stories attract either mushy couples or midnight loners to the cinema. 

But few can digest this saccharine on-screen. This poses a challenge to the director. How to present the idea of love without making the audience cringe? How to make the film lighter? Simple. Dilute love with laughter and give rise to the adolescent potpourri called romantic-comedy, lovingly abbreviated “rom-com”. 

When Harry Met Sally... (1989), the best rom-com according to Google.
Image source: Amazon

A Google search of the ‘best rom-com’ leads to the 1989 hit When Harry Met Sally…, a film which launched both Meg Ryan and countless spin-offs, both at Hollywood and home. The plot chronicles the chance encounters of the lead pair as they question and eventually find love after twelve years of acquaintance and friendship. Each encounter is interspersed with inputs from married lovebirds describing their first encounters, the final frame obviously capturing Harry and Sally. 

What makes the journey of Harry and Sally entertaining? Comical misadventures and friendly (and sometimes not) skirmishes. This easy nature of WHMS in general and rom-coms, in particular, is the genre’s most enduring quality. After all, not everybody is a Shakespeare in love. Or closer home, Devdas. 

Devdas in Bollywood has reached the same kind of metonymy enjoyed by Xerox in the photocopying business. Pick the average lovesick Joe and Bollywood would christen him as Devdas longing for his irreconcilable Paro. A similar Devdas was found in a Bollywood rom-com: Aditya Kashyap in Jab We Met. 

Busy Aditya and bubbly Geet made for a great opposites-attract couple in Jab We Met (2007)
Source: Amazon

His business in shambles and heartbroken by his sweetheart, a suicidal Kashyap sets foot on a train to nowhere. But as Bollywood would have it, he has a meet-cute with the seemingly innocent but street smart sikhni of Bhatinda: Geet (Kareena Kapoor). Thence, director Imtiaz Ali dons the flaneur’s cap and Aditya and Geet go places—love and obviously Bhatinda being their final destination. And all this is dutifully wrapped with typical Bollywood song and dance routines and high pitched melodrama. Jab We Met, therefore, fits the bill of being not just a rom-com, but a full-fledged Bollywood masala entertainer.

What gravitates the audience towards a Harry or Sally, or Geet or Aditya? Simply speaking, love. A more complex answer follows.

The traditional rom-com has three stages: establishing and pairing the characters, creating comical  (and sometimes not) conflicts between them and finally romantically reconciling the pair. As the audience embarks on this close to two hour journey, they bond with either one of the leading pair. They laugh along the goofy situations of the rom-com. They root and hoot for a preconceived end, that of the leading pair ending up together. And the rom-com rarely disappoints. A happy ending awaits amid dollops of laughter, happy tears and warm smiles. This allegiance and love one character of a film (and eventually the pair) makes watching rom-coms a fascinating experience. 

A third factor contributing to the endurance of rom-coms is their youthfulness. Not all rom-coms base themselves on young couples; though, their core structure is reminiscent of one. Their storylines meander breezily and carefree like young souls in love. They are centred solely on the love lives of the lead pair and peripheral characters. No jobs, no studies, love is life, life is love.

A complementary case study: both WHMS and Jab We Met have coming-of-age elements. Both films feature love on the go. Both films showcase the lead pair develop and grow through mistakes and attain maturity. But the coming-of-age element is subtle. It is dampened with the overall youthfulness of romance and the clumsiness of comedy. 

The average audience remembers Jab We Met more for Geet and Aditya’s escapade at Hotel “Decent”, the loud and comical Chachaji and the soundtrack than for the character arcs. Likewise, people do not watch WHMS to see Harry and Sally metamorphose into mature beings. Naturally, film scholars and critics do. But the average audience is much more excited by their chemistry, their chance encounters and their attempts at arranging blind dates for common friends, Marie and Jess.

Rom-coms, therefore, are somewhat like the middle-cinema of love stories. They have the sensibilities of romance and the nonsensicalness of comedy. They are all-encompassing, offering everyone 120 minutes of rosy romance in realistic settings, peppered with oops and laughs through and through. Finally, as Karan Johar would have it, they are escapist, and frankly who does not like a break?