Sweden obviously wanted to take advantage of featuring Stellan on their DVD cover.

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REVIEW:

Janet Maslin, NY Times:
Flaming pastels, singsong delivery, facetiously broad acting and jangling musical numbers are among the things that have long made Indian popular cinema an acquired taste for Western audiences. But ''The Perfect Murder,'' which opens today at the Angelika Film Center, is a bustling and touristy, if somewhat overeager, attempt to bridge the gulf. Conceived as a colorful export, ''The Perfect Murder'' is based on a 1964 mystery novel by H. R. F. Keating, who began writing about a character named Inspector Ghote 10 years before he ever visited India himself. Inspector Ghote, for all his Indian habits, is essentially a Western invention, complete with overbearing boss and comically nagging wife.

Although the murder case he tackles here would never hold the interest of a Poirot or Miss Marple, and although its solution is far from dazzling, the mystery plot does serve as a pretext for touring Bombay and introducing a polite, personable hero. Investigating the near murder of an elderly man named Mr. Perfect - such is the title's weak humor -brings the Inspector (Naseeruddin Shah) and a visiting Swedish colleague (Stellan Skarsgard) all over town.

They encounter a bull with bright orange-painted horns and magical powers; they visit a film studio and watch the mahurat, a religious ceremony observed when the film makers begin work on a new project. They meet a star named Miss Twinkle, who wears a lot of glitter, and they celebrate the arrival of a monsoon that actually helps to resolve the case. On two different occasions, the inspector's exploits lead other characters to be doused with brightly colored buckets of dye.

The direction by Zafar Hai, who wrote the screenplay with Mr. Keating, is consistently genial, if mild. And it's clear from the ''Vertigo'' and ''Spellbound'' posters on view in one scene that Mr. Hai's heart is in the right place. But ''The Perfect Murder'' is as plagued by overacting as Bombay is by overcrowding, and the film's cultural roots are more than a little confused.