Life Hill Gayi: Mountain Or Molehill?

Life Hill Gayi: Molehill Masquerading As A Mountain

Divyenndu Sharma and Kusha Kapila play privileged, city-bred pseudo-adults imported to a quaint, fictional village amid the hills of Uttarakhand in this Disney+ Hotstar series. Manik Sharma reviews.

“HILL-VIEW ROOM mein baithke hills ke baare mein nahi jaan sakte,” a woman declares in Disney+ Hotstar’s Life Hill Gayi. It’s one of those moments when a show’s self-image works against its attendant ambitions. It’s far too pleased to have come up with an insight so slick, so sharp that it can’t get enough of its own prodigiousness. The ‘hill’ in Life Hill Gayi represents the mountains. An altitudinal shake-up that a couple of entitled brats are given in a run-of-the-mill comedy that rarely amounts to funny or incisive. Think Schitt’s Creek, but condescending, directionless and vacuous beyond the pride of a smoothly written adage. Bar the clever title, Life Hill Gayi can neither manoeuvre a punchline nor christen something akin to emotion. It’s modest in both aspiration and execution. Which is not the worst thing, except when you don't know what that modesty has been acquired in place of.

Dev (Divyenndu Sharma) and Kalki (Kusha Kapila) are two privileged, city-bred pseudo-adults imported to a quaint, fictional village amid the hills of Uttarakhand. Their grandfather has tasked both with bringing his exquisite but crumbling resort back to life. The catch is, they can’t do it together. The two must compete in a variety of challenges — orchestrated and accidental — for the right to run the show. They are also accompanied on this awkward sojourn by their doting but wasteful father Himalaya Singh (Vinay Pathak). The six-episode series follows a sitcom-ish pace, with challenges changing colour and clothing with each episode. While Kalki occupies herself with the running the hotel and tackling its unpredictable staff, Dev falls for a local girl whose mild ways gradually seep into his coarse city skin.

The show packs in a fair bit: side characters, a haunting, labour crises and the question of gentrification. It’s clearly proud of the portrayal it has engineered, declaring it in as many words through the local beauty played by Mukti Mohan. But as enraptured as this show seems to be with its cultural specificity, there are woeful blind-spots that slip through. The premise harks to the city-mountain divide, but it relegates people from the hills to the Stone Age. In one sequence, a local offers a ‘sketch’ as a photograph. It’s supposed to be a punchline about the primitiveness of hill-folk, but to anyone from the hills it would be puzzling, if not offensive. In another scene, daily wagers request the Mumbaiwala for the opportunity to meet ‘Mithun’ and ‘Govinda’. It’s either a clue into the era this might be set in or the utter delusion the creators of this show have written themselves into.

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Such profligacy and cultural profanity populate this show with ease. Directed by Prem Mistry, Life Hill Gayi doesn’t quite know its satirical ambition from its dramatic impulses. The humour never soars, stuck in this life-like hell of forcing talented actors to dredge up their own magic. Master provocateur Divyenndu looks lost, dumbfounded by the jagged mix of lightness and depth he is asked to enforce. On the other hand, Kapila is a familiar, ecstatic version of her Reel-making days. She doesn’t act as much as she proves that she can remember her lines and say them with confidence. Only Pathak, for all of his trying, manages to save himself the ignominy of being drowned by the vagueness of everything happening around him. Nothing hooks itself to an anchor, including the siblings who seem neither together nor apart.

The problem with Life Hill Gayi isn’t the cultural hara-kiri, which is a sin itself, but the fact that it can’t quite get the length and breadth of its central conflict right. A grandfather pushes his grandkids to battle for the right to run his business, but barely any time is afforded to the dynamic that must have propelled this inexplicable battle. There are hints, a comment here or there, but little to no exploration of the familial relationships that summon such anti-comical, bizarre dysfunction.

I’m not sure if this is a sign of the times, but streaming discoveries like Divyenndu being dragged to the mulch of something so under-cooked, alongside a veteran like Pathak, feels a bit concerning. Comedy is never a precise target, but drama, emotion and relatability are pretty low bars to hit in a world full of half-hearted adaptations and modular storytelling. Life Hill Gayi believes it has a unique worldview — the conflict between the insider and the outsider — but it can’t really fashion the world that builds on the faith. Perhaps the greatest disappointment here is that given the clean chit of ‘wokeness’, the show can barely muster a decent joke between half-a-dozen quirky characters and their trite and tiresome eccentricities. Of these inanities there is a guard who keeps a CCTV pointed at himself to see ‘how he looks’. You couldn’t think of a better metaphor for a show that tumbles down whatever hill it pretends to climb.

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