From Variety – Fox Searchlight and Participant Media have partnered up for The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Based on the book These Foolish Things by Deborah Moggach. John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) will direct from a script adapted by Ol Parker. Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy and Dev Patel will star.
The story follows a group of British retirees who are lured to live out their days in seemingly exotic India by enticing advertisements of the recently restored Marigold Hotel, a former palace. Though their environs turn out to be far less luxurious than advertised, they are transformed by their shared experiences and the new life they find by letting go of the past.
Book Jacket:
Dr Ravi Kapoor has reached the end of his tether. He is over-worked and exhausted; his South London hospital is out of funds; and reporters are hounding him about a pensioner, who for three days lay on a trolley in A and E, untended, the blood stiffening on her clothes. Even home life has become impossible, as his father-in-law, a disgusting and difficult old man, has been kicked out of his nursing home and has moved into Ravi’s spare bedroom. But then that ‘tip top man’, his cousin, Sonny, has his brainwave, his ‘great eureka’. These Foolish Things is about Dunroamin, a converted guesthouse in Bangalore, where Sonny opens a home for old people. Travel and set-up are inexpensive, staff willing and plentiful – and the British pensionsers can enjoy the hot weather and take mango juice with their gin. Skilfully inter-weaving the stories of the inhabitants of Dunroamin, their characters and their families, Deborah Moggach has created a world in which hilarity is matched with the poignancy of getting old, and comedy with the darker issues of care in the community.
You can read an excerpt here.
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