Petite Thai action star plans to take on the world
2008-03-13

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She may be small and weigh not much more than a drink of water, but tiny Thai martial arts star Yanin "Jeeja" Vismitananda is proving that petite packages can still pack a punch.

At only 162 centimetres (five foot three inches) tall and 43 kilograms (95 pounds), she is the first woman in two decades to win a leading role in a Thai martial arts movie.

The 24-year-old actress is even being styled as the successor to kickboxing phenomenon Tony Jaa, whose work includes the most successful Thai films ever to hit foreign screens.

As the star of the new Thai film "Chocolate," which is due for its first international screenings in Hong Kong next month, she proves a woman can look sweet and act tough.

Jeeja, as she is affectionately known, did all her own stunts for the movie under the tutelage of Jaa, who starred in world-wide hits like "Ong Bak" and "Tom Yum Goong".

"Yes, people compare me to him a lot, but I would like to set things straight," said the actress who has studied taekwondo since she was 11 years old.

"I am not as good as he is. He is my trainer, and I'm just his student. I have all the respect in the world for him."

Just four years ago, Jeeja was a complete unknown.

She might have continued in an ordinary life if it were not for Prachya Pinkaew, Thailand's leading martial arts director. He was so impressed with her fighting skills when she auditioned for a supporting role in another film, that he wrote this script to show off her ability.

Prachya has a knack for stories that sell overseas. When his film "Ong Bak" was released in the US in 2003, it debuted at number 17 at the box office and earned 1.33 million dollars in its opening weekend.

His follow-up three years later, "Tom Yum Goong," did even better, landing at number four in its opening weekend and grossing more than five million dollars, making it the most successful Thai film released in the US market.

"Then foreign distributors asked if I had a female actress who could star in an action film," Prachya said. "So the search began."

The girl of his dreams had dark skin, a solid body and exotic looks. His plan was to sell the sex appeal of this strong yet feminine character and he hoped to find someone like Zhang Ziyi, Chinese star of "Memoirs of a Geisha".

"But then we got Jeeja, who has no sex appeal at all," he said. "So we had to come up with something to compensate for that."

So he wrote a script that he hoped would win audiences with a compelling plot rather than sexy looks.

The result was Jeeja's character Zen, an autistic girl who has the supernatural ability to copy martial arts moves she sees on television and in video games.

She unleashes her powers against an army of thugs trying to collect money from her sick mother who is struggling to pay her medical bills.

The movie's selling point, said the director, is that it surprises audiences by showing a mild-mannered girl doing butterfly kicks to defeat her enemies.

"That is why I do not use stand-ins," said the actress who is in her junior year at a private university in Bangkok. "We want to make viewers feel whatever we do is real."

Outtakes included at the end of the film show just how real her fighting is.

In one clip, stand-ins fall on top of one another into pile, finally tumbling off a building to the ground. One of the men had to be put in a neck brace and carried out on a stretcher.

Another scene shows the actress herself getting kicked in the eye -- an incident that forced a week-long halt in shooting as her torn eyelid healed. Other clips show more gruesome injuries, leaving some in the audience hiding behind their hands.

"Real stunts are what international markets are after," said the director. "Films like this cannot be remade, because it requires personal skills to give viewers a sense of reality."

This 100-million-baht (3.2-million-dollar) film has earned almost 70 million baht in Thailand, and has already been sold to Weinstein Company for eventual US release.

Its first foreign release will be in Hong Kong next month, and distributors in Japan, Singapore and South Korea have already signed up for the film.

"Japanese audiences should receive this film better than others because the man who plays Zen's father, Hiroshi Abe, is a superstar there," said Prachya.

He hopes that his earlier credits will encourage international viewers to see this not-so-sweet "Chocolate".

"When making this film, I made both local and international audiences my targets," he said. "I know what they like to see."