Butter Croissants and Hot Curry

When launched in France,the film created box-office history and is considered a cult comedy even today. In India,Rajpurohit plans to release the film with the tagline,‘Croissant with Curry’. “It’s a French story shot in Bollywood style,” he says,“The film is about how one person can throw your life out of gear and make a sweet,sour,bitter mess of it.” The story revolves around a bumbling hitman,a stock market scamster,a press photographer,cops,a psychiatrist,a bell boy,an ex-wife,her new boyfriend,and a failed suicide attempt. One mistake leads to another and best-laid plans go awry leading to a chain of hilarious events.

The film’s music directors include Faiz Ur Rehman from Pakistan and Santokh Singh. For Rajpurohit,Bumboo is a mainstream approach to intelligent comedy.

“It’s not a question of creating quirky characters as much as about creating a comic situation. Comedy is the only genre which we,as an audience,react to using our brains. The others,love,romance,action,tragedy,all evoke the senses. Therefore,bad or cheap comedy is actually undermining the audience’s intelligence,and we need to create better benchmarks,” he says.

It was during one of Rajpurohit’s business trips that he watched L’emmerdeur on an Air France flight. “Every story finds its director. Francis Veber’s story came to me. I loved it as Veber,like Woody Allen,is an inspiring writer and director. I got in touch with him and struck a deal,” says the director,also a theatre veteran who runs the Bombay Theatre Company in Mumbai.

The film stars Kavin Dave (also the co-writer),Sharat Saxena,Sanjay Mishra,Sudhir Pandey,Sumit Kaul and Mandy Takhar. “I decided to pick theatre actors for the film,people who could throw the punchlines perfectly. Also,I come from the theatre world. I can’t do without the stage,for all my experiences and my evolution as a writer-director comes from it,” he says.