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Published on March 21, 2008

She may be small, but martial-arts star Yanin "Jeeja" Vismitananda is proving that petite packages can pack a mighty punch.

At only 162 centimetres tall and 43 kilogrammes, the 24-year-old actress is being styled as the successor to action star Tony Jaa, whose "Ong Bak" and "Tom Yum Goong" are the most successful Thai films ever to hit foreign screens.

Jeeja, as she is affectionately known, did all her own stunts for the movie under the tutelage of Jaa.

"Yes, people compare me to him a lot, but I would like to set things straight," says 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."

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

This Bt100-million film has earned almost Bt70 million in Thailand. The Weinstein Company has acquired it for eventual US release. Distributors in Japan, Singapore and South Korea have already signed up for it.

No sex appeal

Just four years ago, Jeeja was a complete unknown.

She was discovered by Prachya Pinkaew, director of "Ong Bak" and "Tom Yum Goong", and he was so impressed with her fighting skills that he had "Chocolate" written to show off her ability.

After the overseas success of Tony Jaa's films, foreign distributors wanted something different. "[They] asked if I had a female actress who could star in an action film," Prachya says. "So the search began."

His plan was to find girl with dark skin and exotic looks, or perhaps a Zhang Ziyi lookalike, and sell the sex appeal.

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

Real fighting

So Prachya 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 mimic martial arts moves she sees on television. The film's selling point is that it surprises audiences by showing a mild-mannered girl defeating her enemies with butterfly kicks.

"That is why I do not use stand-ins," says Jeeja, a junior in communications arts at Kasem Bundit University. "We want to make viewers feel whatever we do is real."

Outtakes at the end of the film show just how real her fighting is. In one clip, an injured stuntman is put in a neck brace and carried out on a stretcher. Another scene shows Jeeja getting kicked in the eye - an incident that forced a week-long halt in shooting.

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

The Nation, AFP