There was a bit of Yash Chopra in every one  of his heroes. Like some of them he believed in an ever-after. In the integrity of emotion. Whether that emotion was hate etched like a tattoo on a wrist or anger over the betrayal of a father. Or lost love that a poet mourned through many winters of longing. Chopra was the scarred soul who emerged from a flooded coal mine to reclaim light and he was all the men in his films who came back home to find the missing pieces of their soul either in life or in death. None of his films can bear detached scrutiny. Kabhi Kabhi and Silsila for instance fumbled unforgivably in their climax but then his cinema was never about perfection but as I have quoted Jane Fonda in another review, it was about completion. Not the well-rounded sum of  parts but the collection, the assemblage of moments that took your breath away because they were so earnest, so beautiful, so heart-felt  and so complete in their own right.
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I went to watch his last offering with great trepidation because  I am not an Aditya Chopra fan and Jab Tak Hai Jaan is his story. I have always felt that where Yash Chopra created his own unique cinematic genres, not one but many, Chopra Jr is a master of derivation. He is deeply influenced by Sooraj Barjatya’s regressive cinema where love and individual choices are sacrificed cosmetically for catchwords like maryada, parivar and parampara. His heroines are wimpy and unable to make up their own minds till someone else intervenes on their behalf and I hated his last offering Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi with a passion because it basically endorsed arranged, loveless marriages and touted them as inescapable because they came stamped with the approval of God!
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And what I heard about Jab Tak Hai Jaan fell in neatly with Aditya Chopra’s line of thinking. A heroine sacrifices her love for the hero because she makes a pact with God to save his life ? And he becomes a bomb disposal expert? With a death wish? And has two road accidents and loses his memory in the second half? No, no and no. I have always felt that if there was one fatal flaw in Yash Chopra’s creative journey, it was his adoration for his first born and that is why in Veer Zara, the only false moment was the poem penned by the son in the climax that tried to stand up to Javed Akhtar’s lyrics and failed. When Jab Tak Hai Jaan’s first promos came out, a weak-spirited poem made one wince and even Gulzar saab’s Facebook page hurriedly posted a note saying it had not come from his pen. But we knew that already, did we not?
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Yes, the story is not all there but Yash Chopra is. In the integrity and in the innocent faith he  always had in the idea of love though we can see the master of derivation, his son at play here. There is a bit of Heer (Rockstar) in Katrina Kaif’s Meera, the girl who beneath her unsullied exterior.. swears, smokes and wants to let go of all inhibitions and inevitably falls for a man who releases her from herself. There is a bit of Geet (Jab We Met) in Akira (Anushka Sharma) who wants to scratch the inscrutable mask off a man with a past and free him of his pain. There is a bit of Love Aaj Kal and Veer Zaara too and I  would go so far as to say that the true heir to Yash Chopra is Imtiaz Ali who also (if you ignore his last story Cocktail) portrays in his cinema, an uncompromised, undivided, integrated love in a uniquely personal language.
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That out of the way, this film works because Yash Chopra lavishes upon it, visible love. Because he believes in his characters and this story with such conviction that you flow along too and the moments, yes, the moments are what you take back with you. And lines like, “Har Ishq ka waqt hota hai..abhi hamara waqt nahin aaya tha par iska matlab yeh nahin tha ki hamara ishq ..ishq nahin tha.”  And the poetry of visuals because he was possibly the last of the masters who loved creating paintings out of lakes and snowscapes. Watch Samar on his bike framed against the bare cliffs of Ladakh, or a woman running through snow-flakes and you will see how much detail was invested in each frame. This is not realistic cinema. Women do not dance in hot pants in Kashmir but you are watching a film remember? For reality though inevitably laced with poetry , watch Dharam Putra, Chopra’s first film. He is also one of the last film makers who understood music as the soul of a Hindi film and threaded each liquid note into an indelible visual memory woven by snowscapes, blue lakes, glorious churches, passionate sprints across bridges.

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And yes, the conversations that break and mend hearts. A heroine who is not Chaandni and cannot say much with her face but in keeping with the times, can sing Heer, though a tad unconvincingly and knock you out with a dance solo in a moment of release. A hero who looks too old for the first flush of love but bikes across lonely stretches memorably and says  things that stick, “The things you want to forget, you can’t and when you need to remember an irrelevant detail.. you can’t.” He doesn’t wear protective gear while diffusing bombs because as he says, life hurts far more grievously and kills you everyday, does it not? Atleast death, will come just once. And the epiphanies. That life without love is not life.
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The performances are serviceable but the actors know the space they are inhabiting is charmed and will impart to them, the magic Yash Chopra dusted his characters with. Whether he knew it or not, Chopra tapped into the one thing that defines relationships today. Fear. Fear of loving irrevocably, of losing what your love too much, of investing too much in one person like the young Akira, who goes back and forth between loving a man who cannot love her back and leaving before it is too late. The bombs Shahrukh Khan’s Samar diffuses are not things of wire and tape and dynamite, they are the fears that hold us back from giving ourselves fully to life and love.

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And as always, there is this conversation that Yash Chopra has with his audience through his characters. Have you ever loved like that? Can you love like that? If you were faced with a choice like that, what would you do? Would you choose life, love or fear? The reason why a Yash Chopra film resonates with so many people is that it speaks to their hopes, their dreams, their fears. This film is relevant today because even Yash Chopra realised that the world he once made movies for has changed and along with it, love has changed too. Sentimentality is scoffed at. Devdas has been replaced by Dev D and knowing this, he made a film that he believed in and without any apologies for his sentimentality with a childlike courage. At an age where most film-makers feel obsolete and spent, he made a film that peels off layers of cynicism and disbelief, disregards the unwilling suspension of doubt and makes you respond to characters who can love eternally. What a parting gift. And the final summation by Akira of  Samar’s life is vintage Yash Chopra and maybe it was his last message to us..the gist of which was just this..that this is not a story of fear or courage but of love and if  you have not found the love you are waiting for..it is only because it is not time yet. Because when it is time, you will come home just like Yash Chopra’s love stories. So yes, once again, this is not a film about cinematic perfection but about connection. In my book, that is the biggest thing a film can achieve despite its flaws.

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Reema Moudgil has been writing for magazines and newspapers on art, cinema, issues, architecture and more since 1994, is an RJ, hosts a daily Ghazal show, runs unboxed writers, is the editor of Chicken Soup for The Indian Woman’s soul, the author of Perfect Eight (http://www.flipkart.com/perfect-eight-9380032870/p/itmdf87fpkhszfkb?pid=9789380032870&_l=A0vO9n9FWsBsMJKAKw47rw–&_r=dyRavyz2qKxOF7Yuc ) and an artist.