Chashme Buddoor

Chashme Buddoor (1981)

Womanizing slackers Omi and Jai attempt to woo the new girl in the neighborhood, and fail - miserably. Their third roommate - shy, and a bookworm - succeeds, much to their chagrin. The two scheme up comical ideas to split the two lovebirds, so that their secrets and humiliation are not revealed.

Date of release
1981-04-30
TMDB
7.4 / 10 (19)
Runtime
2h 25m
Genres
Comedy, Romance
Director
Sai Paranjape

Casting

Interesting facts

Chashme Buddoor is a 1981 Indian Hindi-language romantic comedy film written and directed by Sai Paranjpye, adapted from Paranjpye's teleplay Dhuan Dhuan. The film stars Farooq Sheikh, Deepti Naval, Saeed Jaffrey, Rakesh Bedi, Leela Mishra and Ravi Baswani. The story revolves around three close friends, two of whom fall in love at first sight with their neighbour (Naval), but after failing to woo her, and discovering that the third friend (Sheikh) is dating the girl, they vow to end their burgeoning relationship.

Production

Shortly after getting impressed by her debut film Sparsh at the Tashkent Film Festival that took place during early 1980, producer/distributor Gul Anand asked Sai Paranjpye one evening to meet him to discuss an important matter. They decided to do so at the park in front of her hotel.

The name of the female lead, Neha, was suggested by the film's lyricist Indu Jain, and Omi was named after Om Prakash Makkad, the film's editor. A well-received one-act comedy, The Soap Fairy, that Paranjpye presented at the Gokhale Hall about a college student who becomes a door-to-door soap salesgirl, in reality itself a popular activity among girls at that time, was the basis for the Chamko scene.

Farooq Sheikh wanted to work under a respected banner, when Anand signed him. It was his first comedy film. Coincidentally, he attended a college named Siddharth College of Law once. Poonam Dhillon was originally considered for the role of Neha.

Saeed Jaffrey, a London-based BBC and West End play actor, was looking for a suitable break in Hindi film industry, when Anand offered him a role in the film. He spent time with 50-something paan-kiosk owners of Old Delhi (particularly the Jama Masjid area) in honing his character, "to observe the body language, mannerisms, language and its nuances," Paranjpye wrote. He was also very particular about his character's name.

When then-recent FTII-graduate Rakesh Bedi was told by his batchmate Virendra Saini, the film's cinematographer, about the role, he went and heard the character. Anand recommended Bedi to Paranjpye; she saw some footage of his class exercises and selected him. Bedi contributed "a little bit of sher o shayri" to the script, given that he was interested in Urdu poetry. Like his character, he also used to have a bachelor pad.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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