ALTHOUGH THERE'S a plush leather armchair in the room, Taiwanese actress- singer Rene Liu Ruo-ying plumps gleefully for a creaking swivel chair during her interview at the Golden Harvest Group's offices. 'It's just not her style, these taipan seats,' an assistant says.
Liu, 36, is partial to playing wide-eyed ingenues rather than world-weary professionals, even if the pinstriped jacket suggests otherwise. The preference stems from an idealistic worldview that seems curiously at odds with the harsher realities of life in the entertainment business.
The latest example of this comes in the form of Happy Birthday. The new Jingle Ma Chor-shing film not only features Liu as female lead, but the screenplay is adapted from one of her own short stories.
Birthday tracks young lovers - pianist Mi (played by Liu) and architect Nam (Louis Koo Tin-lok) - who break up after university but decide to be 'closer than close friends'. In other words, the pair wants a platonic relationship free of mundanities such as paying bills, quarrels over domestic chores or infidelity.
Despite romantic involvement with other people, Mi and Nam remain smitten with each other. Liu's character maintains anunworldly take on life and love throughout - Nam may be living with a sexy colleague (Sonija Kwok Sin-nei), but Mi's relationships with her admirers never gets physical. In fact, censors say Happy Birthday earned its IIA classification solely because of its 'many smoking scenes'.
'I don't think romance necessarily comes with jealousy and anger,' says Liu. 'Love is often depicted as a very complicated thing on film these days. I want to make a very, very simple film about love.'