Is 'When Harry Met Sally' the best romantic comedy of all time?

What do we want from a romantic comedy? For me, it involves a not-too-serious yet profound exploration of human relationships, pretty people with excellent wardrobes and a happy ending, all acted out against a backdrop of a slightly rose-tinted dreamworld. Nora Ephron’s 1989 classic ‘When Harry Met Sally’ delivers on these requirements strongly, and I’m not alone in holding it in high regards in the rom-com genre, but what makes it hit the spot so well?

The characters of Harry (our abrasive but ultimately endearing leading man, played by Billy Crystal) and Sally (the “high maintenance” i.e. she knows what she wants and gets it dream girl, played by Meg Ryan) are introduced to each other in an anti-meet-cute when they drive to New York together from Chicago university as new acquaintances (Harry was dating Sally’s friend) to embark on their respective adulthoods. During the journey, Harry tries to lazily flirt with Sally, and they get on in a shaky manner, then proceed not to talk for five years once they reach New York. After years of new friends and various relationships, they start to bump into each other again and again until they eventually become friends, living a kind of platonically-married existence. They eventually, and somewhat inevitably, sleep with each other, there's a bit of awkwardness. But, realising their deep-rooted, inexplicable love for each other, they get married three months later - three months and 12 years after they met.

For me, the film is romantic-comedy comfort food. The smooth blend of New York, Nora Ephron’s sharp writing, Meg Ryan’s hair, a friends-to-lovers storyline and an exploration of the concept of companionship makes for a warming cocktail of 80s delight. The plot and dialogue are witty and sharp, and are uplifted by the warm colour palette of autumnal New York (see: stills of Harry and Sally strolling through Manhattan in the fall), the soundtrack, performed by Harry Connick Jr, which is a mixture of originals and covers of buttery jazz (which I highly recommend plugging into whilst drifting around Tescos in a slight daze), and the fashion, which is an 80s dream of garish jumpers and ridiculous shoulders - of which indicates the midas touch of Ephron herself, who worked closely with Reiner.

All of the trimmings only complements the focus of the film. which is one of the few PG-rated human taboos - shagging your friends - and I think this is what makes Nora Ephron’s classic a continual success to date. Whether we want to have sex with our friends or not is an uncomfortable yet wholly digestible topic of discussion - making for the perfect rom-com: not too challenging, not too boring. Of course, in 2021, this debate centering around heteroseuxal male-female friendship could be labeled a little dated. Harry’s friend Jess is astounded that Harry is ‘just friends’ with a woman he finds attractive, but does not want to sleep with, and admittedly I find this vein of thought a little ‘icky’. Yet, a few overly-misogynistic tones aside, I find it a wholly fascinating topic: I’m a straight woman, and I cuddle with, share details of my love and sex life with, and am significantly more intimate with my female friends than my male friends, and in fact the only male friend I’ve ever been similarly close to ended up being my boyfriend. Does this make me Rob Reiner’s smug example that men and women can’t be just friends? (Ephron in fact thought the opposite but sought to explore the premise in this work) I hope not. But I do think there is an interesting discussion to be had here, and ‘When Harry Met Sally’ seems to have contributed to it greatly in ‘89.

The film’s greatness stands as it can still situate itself comfortably in modernity. Its themes can traverse through different contexts with ease: what do we look for in a romantic companion? How do we grow alongside, and with our long term friends and lovers? In examining relationships between women and men generally, Ephron uses the romantic comedy genre to make a few tongue in cheek, yet impactful comments about heterosexual sex, which still deliver the same impact when watched today. In possibly the most famous scene in the film, Sally and Harry discuss how often women fake their orgasms - Harry insists it's a negligible amount, and very rare, yet Sally (shockingly) takes a different view. Instead of frantically arguing her case to be shot down by her slightly arrogant friend, she proves her point by doing just that: faking an orgasm in all its pornographic glory in the middle of a diner, embarrassing a defeated looking Harry, and the scene is tied together by the oh-so-famous quote “I’ll have what she’s having” delivered by Estelle Reiner, the director's mother.

This scene was concocted by Ephron and Ryan, after similar conversations with their male counterparts, and it is the epitome of why the film is such a good romantic comedy- it could only have come from female influence. The proof is in the pudding: according to Richard Cohen, a friend of Nora Ephron, when the scene was shown in a test screening to a Las Vegas convention of film distributors, all of the women in the audience were laughing, but the men didn’t really get the joke and failed to react.

‘When Harry Met Sally’ is a love letter from Ephron, scribbled on by Reiner, Ryan and Crystal, to love itself. A woman who struggled countlessly in her love life (she was married three times), she was ever fascinated by relationships between women and men, and this film is a great homage to that topic. Ephron is open and honest as straight women regarding sex and relationships in Hollywood, which favoured (and still does) showing women falling in love with a man instantly after they opened a door for them. She raised the point that in reality, love is not always at first sight. ‘When Harry Met Sally’ is realistic love, in the least boring, and most warming way, and that lends itself to the praise of being the best romantic comedy of all time (or at least one of them).