1962: The War in The Hills(Disney Plus Hotstar, Arre 10 Episodes)
Directed by Mahesh Manjrekar
Rating: **1/2
Abhay Deol who plays the lead in this sluggish war drama says they didn’t want to glamorize war in this punishing webseries. How could they? When it is obvious they have no budget to even shoot the war scenes decently, let alone spend on glamourizing the cadaverous proceedings.
1962 : The War In The Hills is the best return gift we can give to China for the Covid virus. It is as random, sloppy and unpredictable as the virus, and also dangerous. That is, dangerous to our basic understanding of Indo-China relations.Here in this series the complexities of war diplomacy are whittled down to a handful of scenes showing lookalikes of Pandit Nehru and Mrs Gandhi sitting around discussing cross-border relations as though it was the menu for lunch.
The focus is on the personal relationships of the soldiers rather than the cross-border politics. The battle sequences are few and far in-between. They look like leftover footage from J P Dutt’s LOC Kargil with the a handful of “Chinese” soldiers played presumably by actors from the North East including of course Meiyang Chang, how can any Indian film-series on China not feature Chang?. Another Chinese soldier is named Ug Lee…I kid you not. Hey maine kasam Lee….
Oh , before I forget the Chinese soldiers speak Hindi in the series. This, we told, at the beginning of every episode, is a creative liberty taken to ensure a linguistic homogeneity. More likely it’s is just more evidence of the lackluster laziness evident throughout the series. This battle is bogus . The guns fire blanks, as we are taken into the private lives of the soldiers.
Soldier Akash Thosar(Of Sairat) plays Kishen who falls in love with…you guessed it… Radha. This clichéd relationship gives the series a chance for some diverting smooches love making and pre-marital pregnancy. Major Suraj Singh has bigger problems at home. His wife Mahie Gill is dying of cancer while the brave soldier battles it at the border. A third subplot is about a single father(well played by Sumeet Vyas) trying to cope with his son’s barrage of questions about life.
We have questions too . But we don’t know whom to ask. For example, why were ten episodes sanctioned when the story could have been told in five episodes? Why is Abhay Deol reduced to a shadowy figure: Ashok Thosar, Sumeet Vyas , Hemal Ingle(Radha) have better etched roles? Most important of all, why has no important film on the Indo-China war emerged since Chetan Anand’s Haqeeqat in 1964?
A puppet show sequence in The War on The Hills has two puppets dancing to Lata Mangeshkar’s Kashmir ki kali hoon main from the film Junglee. This best exemplifies the shadowy puppet-like characters, the dry narrative tone and complete absence of commitment to bringing a crucial chapter of India’s cross-border history alive.