As Cannes film-festival venues go, the rooftop at the Hotel Martinez, which has been taken over by a well-known cosmetics brand, ranks among the most glamorous. Over the sound of crashing Mediterranean waves and the Promenade de la Croisette's bustling crowds, svelte figures - most followed by a scurrying minder or three - dart from one parasol to the next, pressing flesh and exchanging banter about their flight into town and the volatile weather or gossip gleaned from a party the previous night. With the sun beating down relentlessly (a rare occurrence at this year's festival), the VIPs mingle, intimate tete-a-tetes interrupted by hearty laughter.
At odds with the calm is Michelle Yeoh Choo-kheng, who has a bee in her bonnet. And the topic under discussion is hardly one you'd expect to be broached over mineral water and hors d'oeuvres in Cannes: the flaws in Vietnam's traffic legislation.
'They have 26 million motorcycles and a whole family is on there - [and it was] only in December that a law was passed that they should wear safety helmets,' she says. The statutes, however, stipulate that only the person not donning headgear can be fined. 'There are other places the law was not enacted,' she says, visibly exasperated.
It's clearly a subject close to Yeoh's heart; the 45-year-old actor is the ambassador of the Make Roads Safe campaign, a project co-ordinated by the motoring organisation Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA). And she's more than just a nominal presence; she visited Vietnam, Malaysia and South Africa during the filming of a documentary on the issue and appeared alongside Lord Robertson, chairman of the Commission for Global Road Safety, in New York in April to hand a petition to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
'We are successful, and that's the beautiful part; next year, for the first time, there will be a ministerial-level meeting, in Moscow, where [representatives] will discuss and identify the seriousness of the problem,' says Yeoh.
Yeoh signed on to the cause because, she says, she was horrified to discover road accidents were a top-10 killer in the world and that a child died in a traffic accident every 30 seconds. That her boyfriend, Jean Todt, was once tipped as a future president of the FIA and was, until March, chief executive of Ferrari's Formula One motor-racing arm must also have helped the actor embrace the cause. 'A lot of us [actors and directors] champion causes very strongly - because we have a privileged position and it is very important,' she says.
Yeoh is now in demand by NGOs; she is not at Cannes to push a film, but to provide star power to a charity event: the American Foundation for Aids Research's Cinema Against Aids evening gala, at a lavish eatery in the inland town of Mougins. She will also, it must be said, be promoting the beauty product she serves as spokeswoman for.
