Hong Kong Heartbeat

The ideal woman: mysterious, alluring and, ultimately, a fantasy. Director Jean-Claude Thibaut is fascinated with the search for this elusive creature, portraying her in different guises–temptress, sylph, goddess, movie star—in his sensuous short films and commercials. Listing Fellini and Yves Saint Laurent as influences, Thibaut has previously created perfume promos for Armani, Dolce & Gabbana and Pierre Cardin, and in 2008 founded Advanced Room, a production company that specializes in the fashion and luxury industries. He keeps returning to the fashion world not for its seasonal trends but because it allows him to celebrate beauty for its own sake. This much is clear from his latest short film, Anytime Soon, which we present exclusively today. Set in the Tin Hau temple in Hong Kong (a working shrine, where “incense ash kept dropping onto the clothes,” Thibaut says), the film stars one of the city's rising stars, Shawn Yue, fresh from the set of John Woo’s latest swords-and-daggers epic, Reign of the Assassins. Yue plays a film director suffering from the disjunction between the real world and the universe he constructs for his films, inhabited as it is by impossibly perfect women (typified here by model Cara G). The mood of Anything Soon was partially inspired by the costumes, which Thibaut sourced from the classic Parisian fashion house Hermès—he describes it all as “a bit Gatsby.” Thibaut works from the premise that wardrobe comes first: “You can’t choose the actors, and then afterward the fashion for them. In fact, you have to do it the opposite way around.”  Music comes courtesy of Chinese classical musician Bei Bei and London-based producer Shawn Lee, whose collaborative album Into the Wind was released earlier this year on Ubiquity Records.