It’s 2028 in Los Angeles. The Olympic Committee has encroached onto the city for its quadrennial event. Ootheca, a company focusing on cockroach meat-alternatives has become the sole food vendor for the games, after livestock-borne disease results in a country-wide ban of animal husbandry.
It’s 2028 in Los Angeles. The Olympic Committee has encroached onto the city for its quadrennial event. Ootheca, a company focusing on cockroach meat-alternatives has become the sole food vendor for the games, after livestock-borne disease results in a country-wide ban of animal husbandry.
It’s 2028 in Los Angeles. Plagues of cockroaches swarm the city. Civil unrest is about to bubble over into the streets, theories of government corruption and unethical practice already bursting through the cracks. The end of the world is approaching, but Jay and Lito are busy preparing for one last heist. One last heist, before Jay leaves these streets, and Lito, behind forever.
Charlotte Zhang’s Tycoon is possibly the most I’ve seen a film made in this century actively commit to the principles of the French New Wave—or at the very least, do so while still being shot in downtown California. Despite what the synopsis will have you believe, for most of its runtime the film acts more as a mood piece, focused on the city’s textural affect than a comprehensive speculative fiction narrative. Much of the film in-between all the petty crime is dedicated to long shots of humdrum city activity or driving, letting us soak in the grime of this approaching dystopia. When it isn’t, Zhang instead backhands the audience to attention. Visceral strobing montages, using a complex blend of loaded archival material, disorientating soundscapes and disgusting mutant cockroaches, are thrown onto the viewer with reckless abandon. There’s a scene in the back half of the film of the gang driving down the highway in silence. Just the numb rumbling of the road around them, the slight car rattle as it jumps between its passengers… until the sound of a car dealership ad cuts in, calling out the credit score system, marginalising those unable to match up to the higher class. Still, it’s just a ploy to sell their own cars to those same marginalised. It immediately cuts to what looks like on-the-ground riot infiltration footage, spliced between archival Olympics opening ceremonies and news chatter about their funding mismanagement.
Corruption. Corporate conspiracies. A hole opens out of the ground, though only through monologue.
Scenes and montages like this slide in completely out of sequence not only from the rest of the film, but sometimes within themselves. Character interactions, even whole conversations, often get completely absorbed by their own parallel dialogue in the voice-over, seemingly from another moment in time entirely. The result is a bizarre form of contemporaneity, making the viewer at once embody the cockroach on the wall, yet feel its legs crawling on their neck. This affords the film a very striking audio-visual identity among its festival peers this year: all the grot and grime of an urban ghetto, presented with scrappy, yet artistic sensibilities.
However, therein lies the problem: it can be a bit too up its own ass sometimes. Yes, the voice overs can come across as a bit overdramatic at times but that isn’t the problem. At points it feels like—either due to budget, directorial priorities or both—the film becomes too preoccupied with the aesthetic of its non-sequitur montages and cutting to cars and chop shops that it feels like it stops commenting on anything else, let alone progressing the main heist. Sometimes it feels like all it is trying to do is create iconic shots or imagery. Certainly, it helped to immerse me in its vibe, but with such a short runtime, that’s all some of these scenes end up feeling like—vibes. In-between all that though, the slow-building drama between the crew from Jay’s approaching departure does at least keep things moving. Miguel Padilla-Juarez and Jon Lawrence Reyes give very convincing portrayals as Lito and Jay respectively, both of disenfranchised men forced to confront the idea of one of them finally escaping the hole they have been trapped in. But to what end? The film’s climax leaves it unresolved, choosing to finally reveal all the cards behind the underlying conspiracy. As throughout the film, the score coordinated by Laura Ohio sells the shock of this with some of the most eclectic and disorientating cacophony of sounds outside of Silent Hill. What Zhang reveals here, and how it is delivered to the audience, made my stomach drop. As shocking as these findings are though, Tycoon has spun its wheels so much by this point that it only has time to point and stare. Outside of recontextualising an earlier heist, there’s no meaningful attempt to connect it to the characters, let alone show its impact on screen.
To some extent this does feel like the point of the film. At the ground level, nobody should really know, possibly even care about all of this. This slice of Lito and Jay’s life represents only a small microcosm of those impacted by this troubled future and how they’re taking advantage of the chaos. Yet, Zhang clearly wants us to care about both, to understand how at least one side clearly impacts the other. By trying to focus on both immersing us in this little piece of hell and meaningfully examine the cause of its inevitable collapse in under 90 minutes, all while maintaining its artistic veneer, neither side feel entirely explored or satisfied by the end.
At the end, Tycoon is left aimlessly spinning burnouts on the road. There is something enchanting about burnouts though.