When Harry Met Sally...

Directed by Rob Reiner

At Harvard Square Theatre

WHEN Sally first met Harry, she thought he was a slime-ball.

When Harry first met Sally, he thought she was frigid.

Twelve years later, they get married, disproving the first question the two characters ask each other in When Harry Met Sally...: Can men and women be friends without sex getting in the way?

According to Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan), the answer is a definitive, but content, "No."

The screenplay, written by Nora Ephron (Heartburn), traces the love/hate relationship between the two from their first meeting on a cross-country trip after they graduate from college to their marriage 12 years later. Throughout it all, Harry and Sally maintain a hysterical debate on the nature of modern relationships and the ability of each sex to understand the other.

THE beginning of the movie is predicatable but funny, with Ryan as an uptight good girl who doesn't eat between meals, and Crystal playing an arrogant and morbid bullshit-artist. It reads like the old boy-meets-girl formula, with a modern twist:

Boy and girl meet.

They hate each other.

[Five years later...]

Boy and girl meet again.

They still hate each other.

[Five years later...]

Boy and girl meet again...

This time, however, just in case you're getting bored, something different happens.

They become friends.

And they discover they have a lot in common. They both love Casablanca. They both have recently ended long-term relationships. They are both miserable.

They develop a truly give-and-take relationship.

He reveals to her what men think about after having sex: "how much longer do I have to lie here before I can go home?" And she publicly demonstrates to him how women fake orgasm.

But there is a serious side to their relationship. Harry encourages Sally to loosen up about sex. She helps him to respect women as people, not objects.

This is all strictly platonic, of course.

Crystal is great as an older more pathetic kind of wise guy than his earlier self. He is well cast and funny but it is Ryan--with her big blue eyes reminiscent of Goldie Hawn--who is really outstanding.

It is worth going to see the movie for the orgasm demonstration scene alone.

HARRY and Sally, like all best friends, try to help each other out of their misery--by fixing the other up with a friend.

He introduces her to his best friend (Bruno Kirby), and she sets him up with her best friend (Carrie Fisher, whom you won't recognize).

The result, of course, is that Kirby and Fisher get married. Harry and Sally stay miserable.

Kirby is forgettable as the typical beer-drinking baseball fan. Both supporting roles are definitely mediocre. Fisher looks older and better although her character's obsession with marriage is overdone and cliche.

Throughout the movie there is, inevitably, growing sexual tension between Harry and Sally. In a big way.

As Kirby's character puts it, it just doesn't make sense for a man and a woman who spend most of their free time together, who find each other attractive and who are both unattached NOT to get involved sexually.

IT'S not spoiling the movie for you to reveal that they get married in the end. Sappy and predictable, the overdramatized ending might leave some disappointed. But it is a climactic release to what has been building since Harry first tells Sally that she is "empirically very attractive."

And although the answer to Harry's original question might be that it isn't possible for men and women to be friends without sex interfering, what the movie really addresses is the reverse question--how can it be possible for men and women to be in a lasting sexual relationship and NOT be friends?

After all, sex shouldn't make friendships go limp.