Tamil superstar Rajnikanth will soon make a fleeting appearance in a French film -- a 10 second kung fu clip from the 1995 blockbuster "Muthu" that will be used in a film by French director Alain Chabat.

The clip, however, is not intended to project Rajni as a swashbuckling hero. A representative of Chabat's production company told reporters at the Goa film festival that the director only wanted a small filler for a fight sequence in his comedy titled "Rent a Wife", to be released next year.

Rajni's fighting style helped his rise to stardom as much as his tricks with cigarettes, which provoked the ire of the PMK party.

He won much attention in his early years for doing fight sequences without the help of stunt doubles. In films like "Annamalai", the directors showed these sequences in slow motion in order to stress this point.

The star lost some of this reputation in his later films, where his fighting skills were elevated to the level of fantasy. In one of the films, for example, he jumps up and catches in his hand a bullet fired by the villain.

In another, the baddie is on the other side of a high wall, but Rajni has two revolvers. The hero throws one of them up and shoots with the other, with the bullet hitting the trigger of the mid-air gun that then shoots directly at the baddie.

Rajni, however, has lost none of his appeal to his fans as a fighter. They can be expected to cheer loudly his less than a minute in French limelight as much as his exploits on the Tamil screen.