Jab Harry Met Sejal (initially titled The Ring)

Star(s): Shah Rukh Khan, Anushka Sharma
Language: Hindi
Line Producer/Executive Producer/Associate Producer Line Producers: Juan Amin, Ashish Chauhan, Saurabh Khandelwal, Sanne Rosinga, Sander Verdonk Executive Producer: Rajesh Sharma Associate Producer: Md Anan Islam Service Producer: Zita Kisgergely (Flatpack Films Budapest) Production Consultants (Europe): Bunty Arora, Leti Singh
Director/Producer Director: Imtiaz Ali, Production Company: Red Chillies Entertainment, Producer: Gauri Khan
Songs and Dance: Please refer to location analyses since the film follows director Imtiaz Ali’s signature style of imbuing entire films with songs and music. This style was forged over a few films immediately preceding Jab Harry Met Sejal (JHMS from now on) such as Rockstar (2011) and Tamasha (2015). Dances: The dance to the song ‘Radha’ was shot in Prague across the Royal Palace Gardens below the Castle and the Vrtba Gardens on Petrin Hill in the city’s Mala Straná district. The dance to the song ‘Beech Beech Mein’ was filmed in Budapest. Starting from singing and dancing in an unidentified nightclub the action moves across snapshots of iconic locations of Budapest such as Liberty Bridge, Matthias Church in the Buda Castle district and anonymous sequences in cafes and apartments. The dancing to ‘Phurrr’ moves dynamically through the narrow sloping lanes of the Santo Estêvão parish in Lisbon amidst crowds apparently celebrating Portugal’s historic victory in the Euro 2016 football championship and then shifts to an unidentified beach location. The song ‘Raula’ is set to frenetic dancing by Harry and Sejal at their friend Mayank’s wedding in an unidentified community hall in what is apparently Frankfurt.
Indian/ International Crew: The film was shot through very large local crew pertaining to almost all departments of shoot requirements. The main credits mention under the heading ‘Line Production’ the following European companies: Punkfilms (sic) (Prague), New Amsterdam Film Company (Amsterdam), Cinemate (Lisbon), Flatpackfilms (sic) (Budapest). Under head ‘Production Consultant (Europe)’ we have the names of Leti Singh and Bunty Singh Arora of Avalon Media who in their website specify that they are specialists in executing Indian film production in central and eastern Europe. Other than JHMS they have been involved with the production work for the Bulgaria shoot of Dilwale (2015). The end credits of the film detail all the institutions and personnel involved with the shoot in Prague, Amsterdam, Lisbon, and Budapest. The logo credits in the end credits mention as European institutional facilitators:

For the Czech Republic:
State Cinematography Fund, Czech Republic
Czech Film Commission
Prague Film Fund
Punk Film
Czech Tourism
The city of Prague

For the Netherlands:
NL Film Fond

For Hungary:
Hungarian National Film Fund

For Portugal:
Lisboa Film Commission
The city of Lisbon
Junta de Freguesia Sta. Maria Maior (The Parish Board of Santa Maria Maior) (Note: This is the parish into which the erstwhile smaller parish of Santo Estêvão where the main Lisbon scenes of the film were shot was absorbed into in 2012.)

Only the end credit details for Amsterdam mention Co-Production Netherlands via New Amsterdam Film Company. Sander Verdonk (General Manager, New Amsterdam Film Company) is mentioned as Co-Producer. The Prague shoot details mention ‘incentives from the Czech State Cinematography Fund’ and ‘Filmed in Prague City, Czech Republic, with the grant from Prague City’. Martin Hulovec is mentioned as ‘Producer’ under the Production Unit head. Details for Lisbon mention a contact person João Roque and ‘Service Producer’ Ana Costa.

The credits are notoriously selective and uneven in the information they give when compared to data sourced from say imdb.com. Thus, Hulovec of Punk Film, credited as Producer in the film, is credited as Co-Producer in imdb which also mentions Ondrej Beránek, also of Punk Film, as another Co-Producer for the Czech shoot. In fact, Hulovec and Beránek are co-founders of Punk Film. The credits don’t mention Punk Film, except in the logo credits. Verdonk credited as Co-Producer in the film credits is listed as Line Producer in imdb. The main credits mention Gauri Khan as the sole producer of the film with no mention of Co-Producers.

The Budapest shoot details list Zita Kisgergely as ‘Service Executive Producer’ with no mention of Flatpack. However, a page on www.locationguide.com details how Flatpack Films helmed by Kisgergely was in charge of the production of the film in Budapest. The page mentions Imtiaz Ali praising Flatpack as the ‘perfect partner’ for his project. The page also mentions that Hungary offers a 25% tax rebate for foreign productions on a basic minimum being spent with local service providers. (Source: https://www.thelocationguide.com/2017/08/bollywood-rom-com-jab-harry-met-sejal-shot-locations-in-eastern-europe/) Flatpack was invited to Mumbai for the closing scenes of the film. Flatpack are known for having provided locations for commercials for companies such as Hyundai, Mont Blanc, Samsung. (Source: https://www.lbbonline.com/news/shah-rukh-khan-brings-bollywood-splendour-to-budapest-2) They also handled the Budapest production for Bollywood film Raabta (2017).

Similarly, there is no mention in the Lisbon end credit details of Cinemate, a 55-year-old company providing studios and equipment rentals for film production in Portugal. However, Cinemate was thanked by director Imtiaz Ali when he went to Lisbon to receive his Touristic Medal of Merit awarded to him by the Portuguese government in 2019. (Source: https://www.thinkstrawberries.com/2019/07/18/imtiaz-ali-honoured-by-the-portuguese-government-with-a-medal-of-merit-for-jab-harry-met-sejal/

In the gratitude credits, Sana Hotels, based in Lisbon are thanked. For catering there is a credit for M D Israfal for Europe. For Amsterdam, Suus and Binkie Film Catering is mentioned as catering for the main crew and De Keukenbrigade for the extras, while the Lisbon credits mention M Catering as caterer. For Prague and Budapest, it seems the team used house catering led by Chef Tomas Trefil in Prague and by Chef Attila Tòth in Budapest.

The end credits detail separate local transportation crew for Prague and Amsterdam. In Amsterdam, Diks Autoverhuur Hexaanweg and Sixt Autoverhuur Businesspark are specifically mentioned as rental agencies accessed by the production.

Film Location Analysis

By Kaushik Bhaumik

Location analysis for a film such as JHMS is a difficult task given that much of the locations happen over very speedily cut fragments of images, sometimes over multiple locations, in song sequences that account for almost an hour of the two hours of the film set in Europe. The director Imtiaz Ali extends a mixing/sampling kind of rapid editing of very Social Media friendly Insta snapshot kind of iconic location images in most of the Europe-based songs that he had used for the Corsica half of his previous film, Tamasha. This time he uses this mode of capturing locations via songs set to rapidly cut snapshots for the entire length of a film. This gives the film a randomised algorithmic feel that probably reflects the director’s sufi philosophy, as well as celebration of the contemporary youth credo of being whimsical footloose wanderers of the world in search of marvels with no pre-panned destination for travel. Here, the wanderer chooses in a whimsy whatever catches his or her fancy which the randomised rain of images signifies. Of course, this algorithm of desire has various moods—it can be celebratory of the youthful spirit to do as it pleases, or it can be melancholic in longing for love and separation from the desired one. The mood of music, action and image texture decide what the location mix will consist of.
The film opens on a sunny day in the Dutch countryside with Harry leading a group of tourists through the Museum Molen Schermerhorn. The sunny day highlights Harry’s cheerful, carefree, and cheeky demeanour. Harry jokes with the tour group and we see the tourists get on to a Cox and Kings tour bus. As the sun sets on the countryside shot with one of the windmills turning in the foreground, the mood becomes wistful and melancholic, and we enter the credit sequence over the ‘Safar’ song.
‘Safar’: The song highlights Harry’s loneliness and melancholia through a montage of very short sequences starting with him looking melancholic in a fast-moving bus through the Dutch countryside. He is trapped in an airless bus, with an alternation of sunshine and shadows falling on his face. This is followed by sequences of Harry at the Charles Bridge in Prague, starting with him eating on the run all alone on the steps leading up to the bridge screened away from the crowds, followed by him walking through the crowds, walking up and down the bridge, and finally him getting on to a higher vantage point with the Vltava River and Prague Castle on the hill behind him. He waves his ‘Your Euro’ flag, used to attract attention of tourists travelling with the company he belongs to (strange given that Harry had, in the film’s opening sequence, ushered his clients into a Cox and Kings bus in the Netherlands); a very brief flash of him holding up the flag in a Budapest location; now a mid-long shot of him again standing on a parapet of the Charles Bridge holding the tour company flag surrounded by a sea of tourists, with the gateway of the bridge looming over him, making him look diminutive under its weight; a brief sequence showing Harry getting ready in his room, his tourist guide identity badge hanging on a mirror frame; Harry in front of Matthias Church, Budapest, leading a multi-ethnic batch of tourists through rain-swept streets, one of the tourists recording the walk on a phone mounted on a selfie stick; cut to Harry leading a group of tourists at the Schiphol airport, Amsterdam, past the I Amsterdam sign; back to Prague at sunset and Harry is facing the foreground with the city sprawling below with the twin Gothic spires of the Church of Our Lady before Tyn and the Žižkov Television Tower towering over rooftops; a sequence, possibly in Prague again, showing Harry being thrown out of an apartment located in a house with a courtyard by his girlfriend; a brief sequence in the Nyugati railway station in Budapest where Harry presumably sleeps on the yellow chairs in the waiting hall; back to Prague station and Harry is shot against a partial cloudy day, with the sun throwing a grey shadow on him, made even greyer by the grey shades Harry is wearing, to convey a sense of emptiness of the heart; cut to a sequence shot on the western forecourt of Buda castle where Harry collects a glob of spit while he is being berated by an irate Indian tourist while his wife looks on, withdrawing the glob the moment the man looks at him and walking away from the scene to emerge into the sunshine from the shadows at the gateway of Charles Bridge; ending with a few sequences of Harry in various rooms, a scene in a Budapest bar where he drinks beer and celebrates with football fans over mugs of beer and the camera moving into a porthole window of a door looking on to the car park of Schiphol airport. The entire montage of scenes of European locations are interspersed with dark grey ‘memory shots’ of an Indian house, fields, a dupatta floating across the fields etc. denoting Harry remembering his home in Punjab from which he had fled from Canada to chase the dream of becoming a singer. The final ‘memory shot’ reveals the name of the place- Nurmahal. The whole song conveys a sense of Harry restlessly travelling around the world in search of something obscure while having dark dreams of the home he has left. He is always on a journey- Safar.
Now the film proper begins and we see Harry bidding goodbye to a group of Gujarati tourists whom he is waving at merrily while cursing them under his breath. He drives out of the airport basement car park in his BMW and stops at a barrier and starts eyeing a girl of probably Surinamese-Dutch ancestry who is speaking to an old white man. At this point Sejal intervenes and harangues Harry to help her find her engagement ring that she has lost somewhere. We realize she belongs to the same group of tourists Harry was saying goodbye to. They drive down the countryside and come to Restaurant RED where Sejal searches for her ring unsuccessfully. A brief sequence on the Prinsengracht follows where Harry chats with his friend Mayank followed by a scene in a Hilton hotel room where he tries to convince Sejal that she should not travel with him since he is a cheap womanizer. This is followed by the night scene where the offices of real estate agents Amstelland Makelaars ‘cheats’ for the exterior of Sejal’s hotel room that is actually in the Hilton. We see Harry leave the building on to the road lining the Prinsengracht speaking on his phone as Sejal looks out from her window on the first floor of the non-existent Hotel ‘t Hoejke. The Seven Bridges are illuminated, the light reflecting on the water, the canal bridges and Prinsengracht street is lit up with bright street lights in gaslight lamp boxes, giving the scene a magical fairy tale feel, almost like a Hollywood film set of An American in Paris vintage where a marvellous romance will unfold. Sejal finishes a call with her sister in India and notices out of her window that Harry is being hit and abused by a girl on one of the canal bridges. Harry walks towards the ‘hotel’ (ostensibly having settled the issue with his girlfriend) and we see Sejal come out on the balcony of her room and stare out. Harry enters the building and Sejal keeps on staring out on the canal scene. A boat filled with night-time revellers passes by on the Prinsengracht, shot from a low angle keeping Sejal in the frame at the top. We cut to Sejal on the balcony standing and staring out with a wistful expression of a face on the verge of tears. The whole scene has an operatic feel with Sejal as Juliet on the balcony waiting to be serenaded from the street below by Romeo. Alas! That does not come to pass.
The next long Netherlands sequence starts with Harry and Sejal travelling by boat (probably down the Zaan because in some shots we can see windmills in the far distance) arguing about sex and relationships. This is followed by a longish sequence in Hoorn that opens with a shot of the town square with its cheese market and the West Frisian dancers dancing dressed as early modern burgher men and women at the foot of the statue of Jan Pieterszoon Coen. The cheese-makers bring in the oval slabs of cheese in their ceremonial dress. A quirky contrast is created by Sejal looking for her ring on the cobble-stoned square diving in and out of the very serious-looking quaintly dressed dancers. Harry dips into the Westfries Museum office where he is told he can’t be helped by a lady who is presumably the head of the museum. Next we see Sejal searching for the ring below and around the I Amsterdam sign in front of the Rijksmuseum followed by a scene where Harry is seen in the lobby of the museum speaking to a woman at information counter lined with museum brochures in many languages. This is followed by a search for the ring at De Kat windmill in Zaanse Schans followed by a cut to the Rijkmuseum. Here we see Sejal and Harry walk down museum galleries while Sejal checks the photos of her visit to her earlier visit to the museum on her iPad (the iPad is Sejal’s constant reference point for her search). She says- it has to here, this was the last stop on our tour, this, Reejeeksmuseum (in a Gujarati accent). Immediately cut to a shot of the Night Watch. Sejal enters crossing the painting from the left of screen and stops in front of us keeping the painting clearly and lingeringly as her backdrop. Harry too enters from left of screen within the same shot and Sejal expresses surprise to him that the ring isn’t there. Captains Frans Banning Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburch and their shooting company stare on sombrely as the couple fight oblivious to their presence. The shot continues as they start walking towards the camera keeping the painting within the frame, arguing about the ring search, coming to a halt as Harry tells Sejal to give up on the ring with the Night Watch clearly at the centre of the frame in mid long shot. Harry tells Sejal to get another ring since her family has a big diamond business (Sejal’s surname is Zaveri, the Urdu-Gujarati for jeweller). Here we are suddenly reminded of how Gujarati traders rule the world diamond trade in Amsterdam (along with Tel Aviv and Antwerp) giving Sejal’s presence in the Netherlands a whole new twist of historical meaning- a strange class connection between the Dutch trading bourgeoisie fuelling Dutch colonialism depicted in the Night Watch and the neo-imperialism of the contemporary Gujarati trading class). As Harry and Sejal leave the museum walking towards the camera we see the Night Watch recede into the cavernous depths of the museum halls.
The Amsterdam sequence ends with Sejal following Harry in short party-wear to an unidentifiable nightclub and then falling upon him egging him on to treat her like a sexy desirable girl. Harry rebuffs her and next we see Harry trailing behind Sejal walking down a street in a huff which turns out to be the street crossing the much-loved Drieharingenbrug bridge across the Realengracht in the Haarlemmerbuurt district of Central Amsterdam. They have a fight on the bridge, all lit up with orange light bulbs. Are all these Dutch bright lights a double of the diamonds amongst which Sejal grew up, diamonds that sparkle with her dreams of magic in her life, at the moment hitched to the literal- a Gujarati diamond merchant as future husband, but increasingly moving towards the glint of the star magic of SRK?
Bus to Prague across a map of Europe. The sequence begins with Sejal going out of an apartment block in an unidentifiable Prague locality and has an altercation with Harry on the street. She walks down a covered pavement with arches with Harry following her. Couples are making out and the walls are papered with flyers for various cultural events in the city. Sejal enters a nightclub and proceeds to buy a drink. People are dancing in shiny clothes and the club is located in a huge hall with a distinct Gothic feel. The Gothic is heightened when Sejal is accosted by a Russian Mafioso who is first seen sitting on a throne with a sceptre in hand. He is wearing a fur long coat, hair drawn back and bunched into a ponytail, a feral face with bad teeth, all typically iconic of such gangsters in pop culture imagery. As the ganglord starts to feel up Sejal she knees him in the crotch and hits him sending him flying across the room. Surrounded by members of the gang she cries out taking Harry’s name asking for help. Harry appears, expresses his frustration with the situation and very soon the two are seen running out of the hall with the nightclub denizen standing all around aghast at the turn of events. Then we see the couple run down a few empty cobblestoned lanes. The gangsters chase, some on bikes and others afoot. They hide behind a pillar at a junction of lanes of the neighbourhood. The gangsters in chase go the other way but one straggler appears on the scene to which Sejal yelps giving her presence. A comic scene follows with the gangster, yet another iconic ‘Russian Mafioso’ in long coat and feral looks to the point of being vampirish, a comic Dracula of sorts or his assistant Igor. Gothic Prague neighbourhood and vampirish Mafioso gel well, all set to self-conscious faux-Expressionist lighting. Harry and Sejal dodge past the guy and go downstairs on to the wooden walkway lining one of the canals in Prague’s Little Venice area. They run down the walkway and then stop. Sejal starts weeping clearly shaken up by the incident as Harry tries to control her as well as keeps a lookout for the gangsters. The gangsters are seen coming down the steps with torch in hand while vampire boy is on the phone. The couple are seen emerging out of the canal into a wooded area where they hide behind a tree. Sejal is paranoid she will be raped by the gangsters. They hear the gangsters approaching and as the chasers come into sight, we see Harry and Sejal run across an embankment towards a boat on Vltava with Kafka’s castle looming in the horizon. They get on to the boat and Harry pushes Sejal through a window and raises the shutter on it making her disappear as if in a magician’s trick. We see Sejal hanging on to the boat on its outside edge with the Charles Bridge in the background. Harry joins her and both dangle from the edge of the boat, invisible to the other side because of the shuttered windows. We see through another window the gangsters enter the boat and a search ensues which ends once they have been through the small vessel. They leave the boat and clamber up the embankment on to the wooded area and go away. Cut to a mid long shot of the Vltava with the Charles Bridge, a fairy-tale white swan drifts past the boat that has saved Harry and Sejal, then still dangling from it. Cut to Harry and Sejal back in the wooded area with Prague Castle on the hill on the opposite bank of the Vltava looming over the scene. An ironic contrast opens up between the fairy tale settings of brightly lit canals and bridges in Amsterdam and Prague- the former being the setting for the moment when Sejal starts being drawn towards Harry in a mood of romantic magic and the latter being a nightmare of the possibility of rape by gangsters. The swan and the Gothic spires of Prague Castle imbue the scene with an even more mysterious fairy tale quality than the Amsterdam scene, but an ambiguous one, one of passage from youthful innocence to a deep uncertain future.
Harry harangues Sejal for having thought of rape and feels frustrated for feeling protective towards her. He tells her to leave because the he feels that the ring cannot be found. A brief conversation about finding god and desired object follows after which we see Harry walk away from the scene (again a full view of the Castle in the distance). Cut to the Prague Palace Gardens that the couple enters through an iron gate. This is a clear jump in geographical continuity as the gardens are located on the bank of the Vltava opposite to the wooded bank on which the chase took place. Faux banner announcements for events at the ‘Prague Concert Hall’ featuring, for example, alternative rock performance by ‘Moire from Delta’, line the railings of the garden. They walk upstairs and come to a covered passageway on the edge of one of the terraces of the gardens. Harry tears down a hanging purple and white banner adorned with the Fleur-de-lys symbol and Christian crosses making up a + sign and goes off to sleep covered with the banner. Sejal sits on a bench, looks up and sees a Byzantine minaret with a crescent moon by its side, feels haunted and comes to lie down next to Harry. This probably denotes Sejal being haunted by a Gothic feel but also probably her latent Islamophobia unconsciously taking in the Eastern-style minaret with the crescent moon as an Islamic scene (all the more pertinent since she has only a few moments ago spoken of rape, a discourse that haunts Hindu Islamophobia). The couple wake up in the morning at different and we see Harry weeping leaning against one of the pillars in the Palace Gardens. Sejal comes up to him and they start talking with the ramparts of the terraces of the Palace Garden at the foot of Castle clearly visible, studded with Gothic statuary. In other shots we see the city of Prague stretching out at the base of the Castle hill with their iconic red brick rooftops. They start talking about singing with Harry singing a bit of a Punjabi song that resounds in the open space and against the open skies. The ‘Radha’ song begins on the Palace Gardens terrace with circular pans emphasizing sound travelling 360° in all directions. The song moves midway to the Vrtba garden ending its frescoed Sala Terrena. Throughout it has an operatic feel to it mainly because we can imagine all of the fairy tale like Prague scenery framing the song as being painted backdrop on the stage. Even the scene where Harry and Sejal sleep in the beautifully ornate Baroque garden replete with beautifully manicured trellises covered with climbing plants conveys a romantic feel, almost Shakespearean, something understandable given director Imtiaz Ali’s passion for the theatre. Otherwise the song celebrates an upbeat youthful fitness of the characters, their playfulness and the nimbleness of gesture making. It’s a beautiful right sunny morning and the couple have woken up to a new happy life after the disasters of the previous night, even the Gothic statuary seem harmless in the bright sunshine. The song establishes a new logic to Harry and Sejal’s relationship that is cemented by Sejal telling Harry to consider her as his girlfriend.
This first Prague sequence is unique in the film since there is no ring search on this location. A train journey later Harry and Sejal find themselves in Budapest. The song ‘Hawayein’ starts while they are on the train and continues as we cut to the cobble-stoned courtyard in front of the Royal Palace in Buda Castle. Harry leans against the stone base of a sculpture and we see in long shot Sejal surrounded by crowds of tourists walk towards at him from a distance with the equestrian statue of Prince Eugene of Savoy at the far end of courtyard. This time they are looking for the ring and we see the café NG Terasz located beyond the courtyard with Budapest stretching into the horizon below Buda castle hill. Sejal tells Harry to playact Rupen, her fiancé, and Harry puts his arm around Sejal romantically and starts to lead her down the courtyard into the café. At one point we see the courtyard framed by the walls of the Sandor Palace quarter. The walls are adorned with ornate gateways, neo-classical pillars, and a bronze statue of the Turul on a high stone base at one corner of the wall. They enter the café and we see the Danube and Pest on the other bank as Harry leads Sejal through the café. This sequence is shot extensively in close up of the faces of the couple and are interspersed with a top angle shot of the café now seen perched on a high embankment of the castle sloping away down the hill with one of the great Budapest Danube bridges and the river itself forking into two past an island in the background; the Hungarian Parliament in Pest across the Danube visible in the background; and a crane shot up catching the Turul statue and Sandor Palace with a gazebo in front of it and the Hungarian flying on a pole on the side. ‘Hawayein’ definitely has a serenade feel to it following Sejal’s plea to Harry to woo her with romance. With an engagement ring hovering in the background as diegetic context and the fairy tale Baroque architecture framing the scene, we are in the realm of wooing the beloved through close ball dancing although the actual dance doesn’t happen but is instead hinted at through fluid shots that take in the scene.
An arch conversation about Sejal being ‘practical’ about emotions and not getting carried away by the masquerade of romance in ‘Hawayein’ happens between the two in the Palace courtyard followed by them looking for the ring in the café. A high angle shot of the café with Harry asking a café staff about the ring follows and the song ‘Parinda’ drifts into the scene. Suddenly ‘Parinda’ is cut short (we see the rest of it in the India sequence towards the end of the film) and we enter the ‘Beech Beech Mein’ song that starts inside an unidentifiable nightclub. The couple sing and dance to psychedelic lighting set to disco beats and then dance out of the club singing the song, cut to Matthias Church and we see Harry and Sejal searching for the ring, Sejal armed with the iPad. A few rapidly cut shots in the Matthias Church area are followed by the two having pizza in an unidentifiable location with the Parliament building visible through the pillars lining the café after which we are back to Matthias Church with its multi-coloured tile roofing. Very brief sequence on Liberty Bridge follows where we see Harry lying on of the iron railings of the bridge and Sejal writing on his Converse shoes while a Cox and Kings tour group passes by, the guide holding a blue flag with the company’s name on it. The song ends with the couple cooking, dancing, singing in a boutique service apartment.
Then follows the longish sequence of Harry’s fight with one of his ex’s in the Bistro Déryné together with Mayank coming into the Bistro and telling him and Sejal that there is some news about the ring at NG Terasz. A query at the manager’s at Terasz reveals the ring was claimed a woman who has gone to Prague which sends Harry, Sejal and Mayank running to the Nyugati railway station to catch a train to Prague. In Prague we see them seek out Nastassja, the girl who had claimed the ring in Budapest, at Goldfingers strip club. They enter the club lit up in purple neon and the couple watch the girls dancing on poles. The couple meets Nastassja on a street while she is being harassed by a group of Bangladeshi ruffians, a situation that Harry resolves by telling the gang that he will report them as illegal migrants to the authorities. Nastassja tells Harry and Sejal that she has given the ring back to Gas, a gangster who lives in Sintra, Portugal (it was Gas’ men who were harassing Nastassja). So now we have ring search for Prague as well.

A flight to Lisbon over which the song ‘Phurr’ begins. Again, the journey route is shown across a map of Europe, sometimes fading to show a glimpse of the Santo Estêvão area of the Alfama and finally fading on to the Gothic façade of the Lisbon Cathedral, the Santa Maria Maior de Lisboa. We see the famous Route 28 yellow Remodelado tram going down the street in front of the cathedral. The Remodelado trams are iconic of Lisbon being ‘remodelled’ by the Carris company through the 1930s on the earlier model of American Brill trams used in the city. The current trams are recently refurbished versions of the 1930s cars. Tram 28, named by Imtiaz Ali as his favourite, runs through the Alfama district. Cut to Tram 28 and we see Harry and Sejal in the tram clearly visible through the rear window of the tram. Sejal has headphones on. ‘Phurr’ is probably the most Insta-type Social Media image-oriented song on account of its faster cutting across diverse locations than the earlier songs featuring the couple. ‘Beech Beech Mein’ is also an upbeat song set to rapid cutting but a substantial part of it happens within the single location of the nightclub. ‘Phurr’ on the other hand has a more percussive bounce to it mixing rock, Afro and Sufi Bhangra beats made more effervescent by Harry and Sejal bouncing up and down the steps of the narrow lanes of Alfama and a very colourful multi-ethnic crowd following and dancing around them and at one point showering multi-coloured ticker tape in celebration of the song as well as Portugal’s victory in the Euro 2016. With the ticker tape in bright colours showering from above on the crowd one almost feels we are in the midst of Holi celebrations in the middle of Lisbon. A person of African origin joins in the dance, a white young man does wheelies on a bicycle and many in the crowd are of all kinds of complexions between dark and light.

The song then finishes more sedately across a montage of Harry and Sejal driving down a highway in an open top car skirting the Atlantic. They had done this once before right at the beginning of the film when Harry was driving Sejal into Amsterdam from Schiphol. Whereas then there was air of irritation and confrontation between the two this time we see them framed against a sunrise looking tired but sated and satisfied, almost figuratively curled up into one another. We see them on the beach, the ocean in the background and the sea breeze playing through their hair as they roam around. Cut to a scene on a higher point above the beach where Sejal gives Harry a shoulder rub against a backdrop of the ocean, sound of the waves and the screech of seagulls and the beach below peppered with the wicker parasols so iconic of Portuguese beaches.

A meeting with Gas in a café follows. Gas turns out to be a Bangladeshi gangster whose real name is Ghyasuddin Mohammed Qureshi. Gas tells Harry to pick up the ring from the Lisbon workshop. We now see Harry and Sejal back on the steps where ‘Phurr’ had happened discussing the way forward and then we have the Clube de Fado scene with Cucu Roseta bathed in red neon, eyes lined with kohl, singing the melancholic Fado intro to ‘Yaadon Mein’ in Portuguese and English. Her voice resounds through space as if she is singing to the vast open space of the ocean. True to the Fado tradition Roseta sings about a sailor who leaves Portugal in search of the riches and spice of India and how his woman cries for him beseeching him to come back to his love from India. Both Harry and Sejal are moved to tears by the song and next we see them both by the sea, Harry shouting a salutation to India across the waters and taking the name of his love from his time Nur Mahal in Punjab. There is a half moon in the sky and Harry’s voice echoes in the emptiness of the scene. A nice contrast is set up between the profundity of Roseta’s song and the more jokey demotic tone of Harry’s exhortations- both offered to the ocean. Suddenly the couple are accosted by a group of men, Gas’ gang, and the two are taken to Gas’ ‘workshop’. Harry finagles his way out of the tight situation by posing as a government agent, Gas shows them a collection of fake rings telling them to take the ring they are after while Sejal finds out the ring had been in her bag all this time. The café scene with Gas and scene in his ‘workshop’ are shot in Prague.

The couple come out on a night-time Prague street and get on to a tram in Lisbon. We now hear the Hindi lyrics of ‘Yaadon Mein’. The couple are shaken up but also feel more attached to one another than ever before. A scene in a hotel room follows where Harry and Sejal almost make love but Harry desists at the last moment. Now the European bit of JHMS starts to wind up with a trip purportedly to Frankfurt and the song ‘Raula’ sung at Mayank’s wedding in a community hall followed by Harry and Sejal fighting and Sejal deciding to go back to India. Back to Schiphol where everything began (although Sejal is supposed to leaving from Frankfurt). Sejal leaves and the song ‘Ghar’ follows showing Harry distraught driving down highways, in his hotel room, showing tourists around Zaanse Schans (this time we have a full view of the windmills in the area), the Budapest Royal Palace area and the canals of Amsterdam, all interspersed with memory shots of him and Sejal together from previous parts of the film (the Portuguese memories dominate this). The final European scene happens at the NG Terasz in Budaest where Harry while conversing with Mayank decides to go to India to Sejal’s wedding. We see an aeroplane flying through the skies taking Harry away from Europe to India.

Location Concept Notes:
It needs to be noted that of all of the Bollywood filmmakers who shoot abroad to catch exotic locations the world over to imbue their films with a touch of glamorous thrill, Ali seems to have a much more historically informed relationship with his locations. The JHMS European locations are not only used for the usual visual exotica effect but also indicate a very carefully curated set of locations of historical importance- the Dutch windmills, museums, paintings, medieval castles, churches, and localities. Ali likes the Mediterranean and together with the locations of JHMS in eastern Europe he seems to be in certain registers of his filmmaking latching on to a World Culture feel to his film driven by areas where the impact of Islamic culture is maximally felt in Europe, for example Budapest and Lisbon (even Prague’s medieval architecture’s Byzantine features make it part of a complex cultural matrix consisting of cross-pollination between Christian Eastern Roman and Islamic Ottoman histories, something that is very apparent in Budapest). Ali is a music connoisseur veering towards World Music set to contemporary electronic and digital experimental sounds of which contemporary Sufi fusion music is a part, something that is apparent in the Cucu Roseta Fado singing sequence that connects European modern folk music to Islamic musical sounds. Also, Ali has a pagan aura about him rooted in Sufism that also marks much of his film philosophy. The Gothic feel of cities such as Prague and Budapest endow JHMS with textures of wild paganism that in this part of Europe swings across many cultural histories. The crowd dancing down the steps of Santo Estêvão in Lisbon has a pagan feel to it and plays to a mix of African, Islamic and European beats matching the multiple ethnicities visible in the dancing crowd (at one point we see a café called Mouraria, Mouraria=the Moorish Quarter where Fado music was born). One could even trace a poetics of building facades in Prague and Budapest, the Gothic façade of Lisbon Cathedral and the façade of the sarai in Harry’s hometown of Nurmahal near Jalandhar, Punjab, built by Nur Jehan, consort of Mughal emperor Jahangir, at the place where she grew up as a child (we see the building very briefly right the end of the film during the singing and dancing at Harry and Sejal’s wedding). Architecture, music, and dance all mix together in an informed way towards some kind of personal cultural philosophy for the director, something that is missing in the work of other filmmakers shooting Bollywood abroad. The marsiya lament underlying Urdu ghazal music signifying longing for the beloved mixes seamlessly with the Portuguese sentiment of saudade.

There is passage in the film of Harry’s life shifting from the rigidly tamed waterways of Amsterdam through the rivers Vltava and Danube to the Atlantic in Portugal. He is pulled along these waters by Sejal whose name means a ‘stream of clear pure water’ (that might have something to do with Harry calling her pure in one of the sequences of the film). On Liberty Bridge we see Harry’s Converse sneakers with a ripple design on the side of his sole that Sejal mimics by making a wave like gesture with her hands. He is drifting along the waters, a river in search of an ocean, a man in search of something that can contain the expression of his oceanic feelings. Portugal is where he meets the ocean and calls out to Nurmahal across the ocean. But Portugal is also the most Islamic of all the European sites in the film that maybe allows for a resonance between Moorish Europe and Mughal India. It is also the site where he meets the Muslim Bangladeshi Gas, for whom too Portugal presents a loop of history between Portuguese colonialism in Chittagong and Bangladeshi migration to Europe in our times. As it does for Harry in a larger scheme of colonial history, the Portuguese being the first Europeans to land in India by sea. Sailors all- Portuguese imperialists, Harry and Gas (Bangladesh being a substantially coastal nation), bereft of the feminine romantic in their lives. Again, is the choice of the Alfama as the main Lisbon location for the film that owes its name and fame to waters a coincidence? Maybe, but the fact makes the tracking of the motif of water in the film juicier.

Any film set in Europe against the context of Punjab in India will echo the mother of all frothy romantic films featuring a couple falling in love travelling across the continent- Aditya Chopra’s Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995). The film not only set the trend for a certain genre of film, but it also established SRK’s superstardom once and for all as well as kick started Indian movie tourism in Europe. A little over 20 years down the line JHMS echoes Dilwale very substantially however with marked difference. While in the earlier film a liberal SRK liberated an Indian girl from the shackles of traditional patriarchy rooted in the land in Punjab, here we find Sejal, from a conservative Indian family, liberate a derelict SRK, tired of the endless freedoms of liberal Europe. Whereas Dilwale ended in Punjab with a hint that the couple are escaping rural India’s conservatism, JHMS ends with the couple firmly re-integrated with landed peasant community life, Harry going back to work in the fields. Thus, the arc between 1995 and 2017 seen through the prism of these films offers probably a context to think through the historical ups and downs of India’s psycho-cultural relationship with Europe, from the euphoria of the early years of globalization to probably a more realistic depiction of things in more sombre economic times. Of course, one may argue that JHMS shows the plight of a certain class of migrants lower down the socio-economic ladder, something that earlier films didn’t focus on. However, if Harry’s real name Harinder has a hint of the green in it (Hara=Green in Hindi) then throughout the film we see Harry disinterested in the tightly framed and manicured green of Europe, dreaming of the green fields of Punjab and finally revelling in a recovered hyper-masculinity through a return to the wilder and more earthy agrarian green of his homeland, now made joyously fertile by the pure waters that Sejal, now a confident urbane girl turned demure village bride, signifies. A really foundational archaic metaphor of traditional agrarian ideology if there was one. Harry now dons the Sikh turban a sign that he has arrived in the circle of hyper-masculine Sikh men who are the keepers of the social order of the village. If earlier Bollywood films showing up Europe as romantic exotica were, at least partially, a thinly veiled representative of the ideology of the new Indian young learning lessons in the biopolitics of cleanliness in European locations against the dirt, pollution and crowds of India towards a clean and fuss-free nation-to-be, then JHMS with its movement from First World Amsterdam to Second World Eastern Europe to a Third Worldly Portugal and finally an emphatic rooting in the Third World itself reverses the biopolitical ideologies of other films shot in the ‘West’ and chooses the dust and grime of India over a dust-free India, but with a strangely conservative gender roles in place in the end.

Finally…a Sikh farmer subsumes the daughter of a Gujarati trading class girl into his culture- a motif for our times when Sikh farmers from the Punjab protest against a state run by the absolute power of Gujarati trading class? A prescient film?

Additional Information & Links

Tourism

While there is no data indicating that the film led to a spurt in Indian tourism in European locales depicted in JHMS as we have for, say, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge or Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara or Tamasha, the film has been nevertheless used as (as Google searches reveal) a reference for many travel agencies to inspire Indian tourists to visit the film’s European locations. The most extensive promotion was done by Cox and Kings (prominently highlighted in the film), which created an 08 days/07 nights Jab Harry Met Sejal tour package highlighting Charles Bridge, the Royal Palace Gardens, the Intercontinental, and a Pub Crawl for Prague; Buda Castle in Budapest; the windmills at Zanse Schaans, a canal cruise at Dam Square, and a visit to the Hotel Hilton for Amsterdam. (Source: https://www.financialexpress.com/lifestyle/cox-kings-introduces-special-europe-tour-based-on-jab-harry-met-sejal/757228/ ; https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1506949986036567 )

Cox and Kings also ran a ‘Spot the Jab Harry Met Sejal Bus’ that required onlookers to spot the aforesaid bus in their city, click a picture and upload it on Twitter. A lucky draw would then allow some of the entrants to meet Harry and Sejal. The GPS-enabled bus visited various Indian cities such as Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad, Delhi, Gurgaon, Chandigarh, Jaipur, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata, and Raipur. (Source: https://bollyspice.com/watch-for-the-jab-harry-met-sejal-bus-in-mumbai-and-win-a-chance-to-meet-srk-and-anushka/)

Meanwhile in 2019, the Portuguese Secretary of State for Tourism announced that Imtiaz Ali, the director of Jab Harry Met Sejal will be awarded the Touristic Medal of Merit ‘for choosing Portugal to film his movies and for promoting Portugal overseas through his Bollywood lenses’. (Source: https://www.traveltradejournal.com/2019/07/portuguese-government-will-award-indian-bollywood-director-imtiaz-ali-a-medal/)

Note: The low impact of the film on the promotion of Indian tourism in Europe is probably attributable to the film being a failure at the box office. This indicates that just shooting a film competently according to or even heightening of the formula of dynamic and exotic presentation of locations does not by itself incite interest to travel amongst the audience. The filmic action on locations needs to generate excitement that allows the spectator to inhabit the filmic location in thrilling ways. This excitement thus produces a hit film and propels spectators to get carried away by the film to travel abroad as well. Of course, once a trend for travel to the location is established, more tourists follow, emulating the trend. But it seems the initial impetus for travel to film locations needs to be generated by the films successfully gripping the spectator with a sense of thrilling adventure in exotic locations.