If Bollywood is not limited to tearful romances, love stories are still a large part of its landscape and among them, many were directed by the prolific director Yash Chopra who helped make Shah Rukh Khan the star that he is today. Jab Tak Hai Jaan earlier named London Ishq is the last collaboration between Shah Rukh Khan and Yash Chopra.
The story
Akira (Anushka Sharma) is a high-energy journalism student whose dream is to join the Discovery Channel team. During a trip to Kashmir, she decides to swim in a lake but overcome by the cold, she is narrowly saved from drowning by a mysterious Indian army officer specializing in bomb defusing, Samar Anand (Shah Rukh Khan).
The taciturn man leaves her, forgetting his leather jacket in which Akira discovers a diary. As she gives in to curiosity and flips through its pages, she realizes that it is the story of Samar's life when he lived in London several years previously.
At the time, Samar was poor but happy, trying to make a place for himself in the English capital, who worked in several jobs, sharing his tiny home with a Pakistani friend and enjoying life playing music and singing in the streets. As the days go by, he crosses paths with Meera Thapar (Katrina Kaif), the daughter of a rich expatriate Indian (Anupam Kher) who has just gotten engaged.
She asks Samar to help her learn a Punjabi song that she could sing for her father's birthday. The young man accepts, on the condition that she teaches him English in exchange. As they spend time together, they begin to develop feelings for each other, but Meera is not ready to start a relationship that could hurt her father.
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Movie Review
The basic elements of Jab Tak Hai Jaan's storyline are reminiscent of the great Bollywood romances. A poor man, a rich woman, a pinch of the impossible. However, beyond these classic motifs, the story is much more modern and sincere than other great rom-coms. The good humor of Shah Rukh Khan's character may seem a bit artificial at first but it quickly ends up convincing us as it convinces Meera.
An effect probably helped by the very beautiful music which turns out to be another of the heroines of the film, as Bollywood knows how to do, by expressing emotions much better than the dialogues.
For me, several of the musical extracts like Ishq Shava, Saans or Jiya Re are magnificent examples of the ability of this cinema to tell stories and convey strong feelings without necessarily needing to understand the words (I don't advise you to watch them separately from the film because it really has meaning in the unfolding of the story).
The songs are melancholic and hopeful, joyful and touching, and the accompanying video accurately describes the images that pass through our eyes. And that doesn't stop the dialogues from being peppered with superb poetic lines
When I saw Jab Tak Hai Jaan, I didn't particularly expect to be convinced by the chemistry between Katrina Kaif and Shah Rukh Khan. As much as Kaif has become a magical dancer over the years, which she confirms in this film, she remains a likeable actress but without stunning charisma.
However, in Jab Tak Hai Jaan she is perfect as Meera. The seemingly cold character gradually lets herself be overwhelmed by her emotions and finds new meaning in them. Shah Rukh Khan plays a role with which he is rather familiar, that of the young lover, but his face-to-face with Kaif gives him a new dimension, more mature and more realistic.
Their two styles combined have something touching, tender and modest, while giving an impression of depth and sincerity. On the other hand, even if we love Shah Rukh Khan, we must recognize that he does not exactly correspond to the standards of youth.
However, in Jab Tak Hai Jaan, his physique is as if sublimated by his character and we can only recognize his class when we see him arrive in his military uniform. If you usually have trouble understanding Khan's popularity, you may find him less of a histrionic in this film, especially as the plot progresses.
Katrina Kaif is part of the new generation of actresses who like Deepika Padukone or Priyanka Chopra, do not hesitate to embrace their partners and adopt less conservative roles than their elders.
The Khan-Kaif couple therefore offers a much more contemporary romance than in the previous Yash Chopra films. Their story also involves carnal relations and that actually helps the romanticism enormously, contrary to the received idea of sex which is opposed to feelings.
I read that Chopra had planned an old-fashioned scene where the two actors were to run among the flowers in the Swiss mountains, Meera dressed in a sari, but that Chopra died before he could shoot it. I don't know if it's true but in any case, the absence of these kinds of scenes, classics of Bollywood love stories of yesteryear, is rather a strong point.
Meera's very westernized character had no place in this environment and the realism of their love story relies precisely on the fact that the magic of their relationship illuminates their daily setting.
Besides the two main actors, the third lead, Anushka Sharma is a real asset. Her extravagant character gives us an ambitious and determined girl who balances the sweetness of the couple's story with her enthusiastic energy. Even if the film claims that she too falls under Samar's spell, its lightness suggests that it is not necessarily as serious as she claims, which means that I did not feel any of the usual unpleasantness of the love triangle.
In short, even if part of the plot might seem slightly lacking in realism, we immediately forget it as the feelings it illustrates are sincere. I love movies and I love romantic comedies in general. Yet, I have to admit, I don't always completely believe the couples that are shown to me.
Jab Tak Hai Jaan is one of those rare films which seems to me to capture the true essence of a love story, that of Meera and Samar but also beyond.
Love, music, drama, twists and turns, dance and beautiful landscapes, these are the ingredients of a very good film. Jab Tak Hai Jaan is certainly the most westernized film that Yash Chopra has made. Less kitsch in the eyes of an outsider, it falls into the category of musical films.
Paradoxically, Jab Tak Hai Jaan remains very classic in its history and development. But it is not to displease the spectators that we are eager to shed a tear over impossible loves.
If you are looking for a realistic film with a plot that fits into everyday life, this is not the film since Yash Chopra is characterized for creating romantic and idyllic worlds. However, what has been said is not bad, on the contrary, the director creates his own code by which he is recognized.
What happens in Jab Tak Hai Jaan has the stamp of this director, with the romantic and charismatic hero effectively played by Shah Rukh Khan. There is also the beautiful, impeccable protagonist, with an almost unstoppable halo around her (of course we are talking about Katrina Kaif) who, although her acting skills did not stand out in this film, it is worth noting that she was seen as something out of a dream. .
On the other hand we have Akira, played by Anushka Sharma, who is a break between the idyllic world of Yash Chopra from previous years, mixed with the modernity that was intended to be implemented in this film. She is something like a 21st century Chandni but with much more independence (we are referring to the role of Sridevi from the 1989 film Chandni, where she plays a lively woman, this film was also directed by Yash Chopra).
Anushka makes Akira believable and a likable character, although at times it seems like her enthusiasm gets out of control.
JTHJ brings back the magic of Yash Chopra's films, with a touch of modernity. This is what made it a double-edged sword, because although what Chopra wanted to reach with this film was a youth mass, the way in which Chopra wanted to achieve it was perhaps not appropriate. In the script the plot twists failed to convince the viewer to make this a coherent space.
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If JTHJ has a problem, it's the script also adding more than 3 hours of duration, which in parts feels a bit tedious but still JTHJ is an entertaining film. It never hurts to immerse yourself in Yash Chopra's romantic universe.
Beyond these surprising inventions and arrangements of sequences, the great theme of this film remains LOVE. But like Veer-Zaara which proposed a double meaning, healing the wounds of the score, here other subtexts emerge. Certainly, Yash Chopra takes a look at the morals of youth and the vision of love as a consumable, but free will remains at the heart of the film.
Playing on contradictions throughout the story, in order to highlight the issues, he questions religion, its beliefs and its blind influence on beings. He denounces the dangers of excessive and misinterpreted faith. Christianity serves as Swiss ground, finally neutral, to address an evil which annoys and persists as the genesis of human conflicts.
Yash Chopra serves with conviction a final ode to Hindi cinema through grandiloquent passion. A perfect conclusion to his work where he exposes to current and future generations of filmmakers the possibility of keeping the traditions and values of an “ancestral” art and of perpetuating it by modifying it.
It demonstrates that we must above all not leave an art frozen in mothballs, but make it evolve with the times, while retaining its substance. A heart-invigorating classic! A fascinating ode which, beneath simplistic trappings and manipulation of feelings, reveals itself to be quite different.
