Back in the 1980s and 90s, Zhang Yimou (Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern) was acclaimed as one of the most talented directors to emerge from China’s “fifth generation”, film-makers whose work broke with the socialist realist style of their predecessors. While still working within the establishment industry, the fifth generation – including Chen Kaige and Tian Zhuangzhuang – were considered to varying degrees if not quite dissident, at least somewhat heterodox and anti-authoritarian. Either way, having started out as a cinematographer, Zhang quickly became an arthouse darling abroad, feted for his lush visual style, his command of highly kinetic action sequences (as seen in wuxia extravaganzas like Hero and House of Flying Daggers) and eye for spotting and showcasing great female actors, such as Gong Li and Zhang Ziyi.
Today, in a very different political and national landscape, Zhang doesn’t have the same heroic, darling-of-the-west aura anymore. He’s become an establishment figure and chief engineer of state-sponsored spectacles like the opening and closing ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics and Winter Olympics. If, unlike Wim Wenders, you can’t entirely separate politics from art, then Zhang’s latest, Scare Out, looks like pro-state propaganda, given it is about spies trying to flush out a mole among their ranks who is smuggling super-secret tech to nefarious western rivals.
