Shu Qi: the Millennium Actress dazzled the Lumière Festival
Taiwanese cinema icon, pop star and author’s muse, Shu Qi lit up the Lumière Festival. In front of a won over audience, the actress from The Assassin and Millennium Mambo spoke about her method, her freedom and this new role: that of director.
When Shu Qi took the stage at the Lumière Festival, time seemed to slow down. No great effect, no pose: just this disconcerting, calm, almost unreal beauty. A presence, more than an appearance. Not a word, just a slight greeting, and everyone understands why the cameras, for twenty years, have loved him so much. This beauty astounds without showing off. She doesn’t charm, she suspends. In Lyon, the Taiwanese actress came to present Girlher first film as a director (photo below), and pay tribute to the one who revealed her, Hou Hsiao-hsien. A perfect loop, almost tender: the student who greets the master, in the sanctuary of heritage cinema.
On stage, Shu Qi speaks in a soft, measured voice. She says: “Once I have makeup on, something becomes natural, I become the character. » This “becoming” is the heart of his art. In her, there is no distance between the woman and the role; only gray areas that she illuminates in her own way. “I didn’t have a script, just a few words, so I had to enrich it in my own way. » This sentence sums up his apprenticeship with Hou Hsiao-hsien: filming the unspeakable, living in the vague, seeking the truth in the unexpected.
Listening to her, we realize how much Hou’s cinema has shaped her. “If an actor doesn’t play well, it’s never his fault, it’s the director’s,” she says, smiling. No revolt, just the awareness of a pact. On the sets of Hou, the camera remains far away, almost invisible: “We are in an environment where we live, without artifice. We can’t see either the boom or the spotlights. » This is how she learned freedom: not to play, but to breathe. In Millennium Mamboshe floated in the Taipei night; In Three Timesit spanned the century. And then there was The Assassin.
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Released in 2015, the film earned Hou Hsiao-hsien the Best Director Award at Cannes. For Shu Qi, it is a metamorphosis. She plays Nie Yinniang, a killer trained since childhood, on a mission to eliminate the one she still loves. “I trained for two years to build my body and my energy,” she says. For Hou, duels become silences, fights become breathing. Nie Yinniang renounces killing, and Shu Qi lends this gesture incredible grace. In his eyes, there is fatigue, gentleness, inner war. We understand why Hou filmed it like a landscape: to capture the light passing through it.
His career looks like this: zones of calm crossed by splinters. Shu Qi has shot for Johnnie To, Stephen Chow, Dante Lam; it goes from a Hong Kong comedy to a Taiwanese meditation with the same ease. “I see myself as a blank slate and I let the director create me on that page,” she says. This rare availability explains her mystery: she does not protect herself, but never completely gives herself up. For a long time, she was reduced to her beauty, to her beginnings in charming films; She chose to make it a tool, not a prison.
Today, at 49, she goes behind the camera. Girlwhich she presents in Lyon, extends her obsessions: memory, time, the sweetness of reality. It was Hou who encouraged her to direct, as if he had passed the torch to her. It was Hou who encouraged her to direct, as if he had passed the torch to her. She films Taiwan with modesty, rediscovering the slow rhythms of her mentors, but with a more direct, almost tactile emotion. We feel that her cinema is born from silence, that it breathes like her: calmly, intensely.
In GirlShu Qi tries his hand at an intimate story. We follow the tense childhood of Hsiao-lee, a Taiwanese teenager confronted with family violence. Rather than filming the beatings, Shu Qi chooses immersion: the little girl is often shown from inside a closet or behind a door, so that the viewer feels what she feels – the confinement, the fear, the heavy silences. It took her 11 years to write this film before inventing a cinematographic grammar of “girlhood”, a language made of bodies, shadows, non-verbal emotions.
When the masterclass ends, Shu Qi waves lightly. She doesn’t say anything, but everyone understands. Her beauty is not obvious, it is a discipline: that of an actress who listens to the world before speaking. In Lyon, she did not come to play Asian icons, but to embody what Lumière celebrates: the persistence of faces, the grace of time, the quiet brilliance of cinema when it remembers that it is first and foremost a living art.
