Tycoon

Canadian visual artist Charlotte Zhang’s blistering experimental work proposes a claustrophobic and foreboding vision of Los Angeles on the brink of social explosion, as told through an impressionistic chain of events following the sudden disruption of the city’s meat supply.

Los Angeles, 2028. Just before the Summer Olympics. A livestock virus is taking out all meat and poultry, at the same time there is a cockroach infestation across the city. It’s a perfect storm for a new business opportunity as society is forced to consider a new source of protein. Two young men, petty thieves some might call them, hatch a plan, as the confined urban spaces around them reveal and conceal an atmosphere brimming with paranoia and simmering rage. 

Charlotte Zhang’s feature directorial debut is an impressionistic act of resistance in the form of a nocturnal noir with no wave punk energy. The absence of a social safety net is the everyday reality for these working-class Angelenos, brown bodies that inhabit private spaces of concrete and chrome as ICE raids, helicopters, the threat of police and eco-disasters close in around them. Cars become the sites of rage and animating vitality. This state of dispossession is punctured by an allusive collage of images, layered dialogues, intertitles and 1950s doo-wop music.

– Michelle Carey

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