Talk is the sex of the '80s. In a time when you can hardly initiate a handshake without a note from your doctor, conversation is not just a white- collar mating dance; it is the most intimate form of safe sex. Over the telephone or a restaurant table, a man and a woman expose their emotions, exchange seminal fears and desires, make each other laugh and sob -- all without touching any organ but the heart. Talk is the consummation devoutly to be wished; no wonder they call it intercourse. It is confession without penance, therapy on the cheap. It is also, in the right mouths, the last civilized popular art.
Wit, conflict, a little sex. Good stuff for a movie? Good enough for a pair of terrific movies: When Harry Met Sally . . . , written by Nora Ephron and directed by Rob Reiner; and sex, lies, and videotape, written and directed by Steven Soderbergh. Their characters are quick and engaging; they could be the thirtysomething folks on a good day, in a gilded mirror. As Ephron says, "People who live in cities aren't in car chases. We don't get shot at. What we mainly do is talk on the phone and have dinner." Her film and sex, lies serve up the urban scene at its most urbane. Clean taxis and great apartments appear in a trice, and no one's upscale job deprives him of quality time for soul scratching. But in both films the surface prettiness is just a device; it clears the cityscape of its daily detritus to focus on what matters: love, sex and friendship.
When Ephron met Reiner to discuss a script, she recalls, the director said, "I want to do a movie about two people who become friends and are really happy they become friends because they realize that if they had had sex it would have ruined everything. And they have sex and it ruins everything." Start with randy Harry (Billy Crystal) and precise Sally (Meg Ryan) in the Manhattan of your dreams, at the beginning of a beautiful friendship. But are they aware that falling in like can be as dangerous as falling in love? Reiner, who based the film partly on his life after being divorced from actress Penny Marshall, thinks he knows: "People say, 'Vive la difference,' but it's more like a cruel joke created by God. Men and women desperately want to be with each other, but at the same time they can't stand each other and don't understand each other."
So Harry and Sally go to movies together, confide romantic traumas, even try double-dating with their respective best friends (funny Bruno Kirby and Carrie Fisher) -- all the while fending off the inevitable erotic attraction. When they do surrender sexually, it is just what Harry feared. "The 'during' part was good," he admits. But postcoitally, while she glows, he glowers. He realizes that as friends they had been making love, with words and caring. Going to bed with Sally was just having sex. And now, like any guy who got what he came for, he wants out.