Thursday, November 15, 2012
Jab Tak Hai Jaan
Last Love Letter
It is with a twinge of sorrow that one refers to Yash Chopra in the past
tense. He was a filmmaker who foresaw
and set trends in Bollywood and his love stories were personally signed
valentines to his audience.
Veer Zaara held the
essence of everything he stood for, but since a filmmaker can never let his creativity
atrophy, he made Jab Tak Ha Jaan,
which, unfortunately, turned out weak, soppy and derivative—in short, not up to
the standards he set for himself. Aditya Chopra’s story borrows from The Titanic, The Vow, Hurt Locker and
maybe Hindi film memory-loss chestnuts like Amar
Deep (1958) and Prem Bandhan
(1979) and some of YRF’s own productions like Dil To Pagal Hai.The script is full of contrivances and old-hat devices like detailed diaries conveniently left around for the right person to read. And what it to be said for the ‘ideal’ heroine, who pines forever for her lost lover.
Rich London girl Meera (Katrina Kaif), has the habit of striking
bargains with Jesus in an always glittering but abandoned church. Samar (Shah Rukh Khan) is a busker, waiter,
odd job man in London. Of all the people
in the city, Meera picks the street singer to teach her a Punjabi song for her
father’s birthday. Like Jack in The Titantic, Samar takes the heiress to the underground of
dance and booze, she never encountered and unleashes the “gali ki gundi” in her. There
is no rich-poor issue at all, so there was no reason for Samar to be an
impoverished, struggling ‘young’ man, just Bollywood force of habit.
For the flimsiest of reasons—laughable really—Meera leaves him. Samar, recovering from a life-altering
accident, heads straight to the Indian army and into the bomb squad in Kashmir,
for The Hurt Locker bits. There, in
his bearded and grim avatar, is meets
the annoyingly shrieky documentary filmmaker Akira (Anushka Sharma), who wears
the tiniest of shorts and thinnest of tops when everyone else in winter
clothing.
She falls for him too, but like “today’s generation” is cool and shrug-y about love, her ambition being to bed men with all accents. Then she summons Samar to London, he goes reluctantly and had another accident, which results in “retrograde amnesia” (people in the cinema laughed!). He remembers Meera and forgets Akira, who, however, does all she can to help—including bringing Meera back. By this time the film is already too long, you know where it’s headed and are wishing it ends quickly. The music does not have the Yash Chopra magic and Gulzar’s lyrics are kind of lost in Rahman’s compositions.
There are touching Yash Chopra moments, but nothing to beat his own
tear-inducing sequences from past films.
Shah Rukh Khan’s charm keeps the film running on empty. Katrina Kaif
looks pretty and manages to pull off a couple of tough scenes, while Anushka
Sharma looks too scrawny and tries too hard. Jab Tak Hai Jaan is worth look only because it marks the end of an
era. It’s heart-breaking that Yash Chopra
won’t be making films any more.
Labels: Cinemaah
Comments:
Post a Comment
