The adaptation on screen of Graham Green’s novel The End of the Affair is the exemplary sample of modern bollywood melodrama and, at the same time, the very last movie of Yash Chopra that was shot during his fruitful film-maker’s life. Jab Tak Hai Jaan enchants the viewer by using spectacular scenes and music sequences in spite of the chamber plot.
2012 – 176 min – romantic drama
language: Hindi – subtitles: Czech, English
directed by: Yash Chopra
cast: Shah Rukh Khan, Katrina Kaif, Anushka Sharma
Yash Chopra, who died from complications connected to the dengue fever shortly before completing Jab Tak Hai Jaan, had the reputation to be a bold director who was not afraid of sensitive social topics. The genre range of his filmography extends from socially critical dramas to majestic melodramas. He became most famous with his spectacular melodramas, which were very much imitated and parodied, and which actually highly contributed to shape the face of Bollywood in the 90’s.
The melodrama of Chopra’s films is not only evident in its tense and emotional moments, but also in its whole dramatic structure. It is hard to find any western-type analogy except for the soap opera branch. Jab Tak Hai Jaan puts emphasis strictly on emotions and on the visual and musical display and, on the other hand, the credibility of the plot (if you compare it to reality) or the vividness of characters is not of great consequence. Such statements serve to categorize the film into the poetic tradition and should not be considered as a critique.
Jab Tak Hai Jaan, whose plot was inspired by Graham Green’s famous novel The End of The Affair, is such an energetic and aesthetically admirable movie, that it will attract even a cynical viewer’s attention, who would unlikely identify himself or herself with the main characters. The motion picture is based on a chamber plot which tells the story of a charismatic soldier Suman (Shahrukh Khan) and two femmes fatales who came into his life. Chopra adds breath-taking scenes and unrestrained music.
Jab Tak Hai Jaan met with strong success not only in India but outside the country as well. Some journalists were surprised by the fact that such a modern movie was directed by an 80-year-old film-maker. Even high-prestige magazines as, for example, Variety and The Hollywood, published positive reviews on Jab Tak Hai Jaan. Lisa Tserling, reviewer of The Hollywood magazine, makes a funny observation about the closing credits where you can find a choreographer as well as an explosive expert.
