LOVE WILL SAVE YOU - Cyrus Hoshi Merchant

It was a late-night screening held for friends, a pate and grilled toast trial show with Zurich's cinnamon winter biscuits being passed around through which Karan Johar stood for three full hours. He needn't have; the film straps through your seat as it shoots at the soul. It's a knockout, sleek, shot from start-to-finish in New York, hip and heartfelt.

As Yash Birla said, "it’s not possible for anyone who has a soul to not be deeply moved by the movie." A statement sealed by Tanya Godrej Dubash’s moist eyes. Yes, it's a heartbreaker; Shah Rukh Khan does it again, a larger-than-Life man who descends suddenly into the lives of a bruised family and re-invents their Life with faith, warmth and humour.

He goes through the film on the balls of his feet, light; leaving us with the heaviness of his impending death. Saif Ali Khan in fall's latest suits and MBA pizzazz leavens the dough, anxious for a woman who is his best friend but can never be his great love.

"A relationship needs to start with deep friendship and end with deep friendship, but what it needs most is the in-between deep love." The film gives enough of that, it does. A disturbed, abandoned Preity Zinta speaks for the current generation looking for Love and not finding it; only to be handed a chance at Life by someone who is losing it. She takes it, opens her heart and finds a hammer looming over it. Her grief, her run from Bloomingdale's, past NY's taxis and upto her favourite solitary space by the river is a wrencher. For anyone who has lost their most precious love, she weeps our tears.

“And along comes saviour Shah Rukh; five minutes after she and her mother Jaya have knelt and prayed to God. Her reluctance to accept it, her confusion, her lingering past despair freezes her, until Shah Rukh axes the ice with the film's most powerful words: "why did you pray to God for Love and a Miracle if you are unable to accept it and recognise it when He sends it to you. Take a chance, Live."

Karan Johar in real Life too, along with Shah Rukh is a great Life lover. Few are aware that even while making this film and taking on its innumerable challenges; he was by his father’s side, combating an illness. He makes his movies the way he lives his Life.

Easily the film's two most understated powerful components of the two mothers comes from his deep attachment to his own. Jaya Bachchan and especially Reema Lagoo as the two mothers in pain over their respective children's doomed lives are outstanding. They are rewarded by children who though deeply unhappy are consumed with making their mother's dreams come true.

The film addresses on a very subtle level even the issue of fidelity and guilt and the importance of forgiveness and letting go. Letting go; that seems to be the main thrust. Let go and let God and let your Life live itself. But live you must. And should the chance of Love come along, take it.

Because Real Love saves, Real Love can't be questioned or understood and like Shah Rukh says on his deathbed, it can be "claimed in the next and the next and the next Lifetime too." Kal ho na ho, at least, if for today, you can live with love and love who you live with, Life which we can't make sense of, somehow makes sense of Itself.