In her film Tycoon, Charlotte Zhang uses the restrictions of what she could represent to her advantage.Harry Gamboa/Supplied
The year is 2028, and pandemic livestock viruses have rendered genetically modified cockroaches the only viable source of food. Not unrelated: A cockroach infestation is ravaging Los Angeles, and the city is making preparations for the imminent Summer Olympic Games.
Charlotte Zhang, 26-year-old resident of L.A. hailing from Nanaimo, B.C., came up with the idea for Tycoon when her own apartment was overtaken by roaches. The film, her feature debut, was made with friends and without permits.
Unlike many independent films, it makes no attempt to conceal its tiny budget. Zhang shot much of the film on a MiniDV camcorder, made the props herself and convened her tiny crew on weekends. It is a total picture: A film made with and about limited means, about the marginalized, displaced and broke people who head out into the streets to make art, love and money. This week, it premiered at International Film Festival Rotterdam.
Zhang moved to California from B.C. to study film and fine art at CalArts, just north of Los Angeles. She’s pursued sculpture and filmmaking alternately since graduating.
“I’ll go where the money takes me,” she says with a laugh. Between short films, she put together Tireslashers, a showcase of her sculpture work, for Vancouver’s Polygon Gallery (where Tycoon will have its North American premiere Feb. 12). Among other pieces, the show includes Bloodsport/Playground Rules (2023), a collection of ready-made dividers taken from benches designed to keep members of the public from lying down in public space. It’s an apt precedent for Tycoon, a film about the petty crimes that unfold against the backdrop of larger thefts.
“It’s well documented that sporting events are wonderful opportunities for a few people to make a lot of money at the expense of the public,” Zhang says, referring to the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. “I’m trying to take account of what changes are happening, the violence that’s getting exacerbated every day by the arrival of this sporting event.”
A scene from Tycoon.Supplied
Between credits, the first scene shows the film’s two leads Lito (Miguel Padilla-Juarez) and Jay (Jon Lawrence Reyes) jumping out of a car and stealing a delivery robot (Zhang constructed the prop herself using a garden wagon and BMW headlights). It’s the first of many high-risk and low-reward schemes that form the bulk of the film’s plot. Tycoon’s world is dog-eat-dog, a devastated economic landscape where moments of tenderness are just another thing that needs to be stolen. Its fiction is hardly speculative, and in many respects it depicts a world much like our own.
“Part of it comes down to budget. My goal was to never make Tycoon look more expensive than it is. I find that so uninteresting.”
Working with limited means, Zhang didn’t need to strain to create an impression of poverty. In Tycoon, she uses the limits of what she could represent to her advantage.
“There’s this thing that people say when you have cockroaches, that when you see one or two bugs during the day, it means there’s thousands living in the walls. I wanted to use that paranoia of what’s unseen in the film.”
A scene from Tycoon.Supplied
Tycoon finds other ways to evoke its apocalypse, making special effects out of strobing Super 8 footage, sudden flashes to night vision and heavily Xeroxed still photographs that flicker on screen. The film is at its best deploying these fragments. Dialogue is looped and muttered, bringing to mind the work of another young Canadian visionary filmmaker (and friend of Zhang’s), Winnipeg’s Isiah Medina.
“I wanted to conjure an atmosphere of restlessness and exhilaration and dread which pervades the very-near-future, and depict the conditions faced by the characters by means of structure rather than rely purely on visualization, which I did not have money for anyhow.”
Bereft of Hollywood’s resources, Tycoon is also skeptical of Hollywood’s notions of romance. It’s tough to find time for love on an empty stomach (or one full of cockroaches).
Zhang's editing suite in an auto body shop.Charlotte Zhang/Supplied
In the film’s world of hustlers and petty crooks, love can only peek around the corners. It’s expressed in the street takeovers that Zhang films, where drifting cars encircle one another amid a celebrating crowd. Or in the soundtrack, where stabs of harsh noise (it bears mentioning that Tycoon was partially edited at her friend/collaborator’s autobody shop), finally break into Ketty Lester’s Love Letters for a final reverie. Love, in Zhang’s film, is a trespassing violation, a community bound together in spite of the powerful forces pulling at its seams.
“It defies categories, especially in terms of films you might encounter at festivals,” says Michelle Carey, the IFFR programmer who selected the film. “It’s not formalist-abstract but it’s not purely narrative either. Charlotte is forging her own cinematic path.”
The French filmmaker Jean-Marie Straub once said, “I think the cinema will only begin when the film industry is dead.” Tycoon doesn’t need to look far down the road to envision such a time.
“Maybe this is too optimistic,” Zhang says. “But I think a lot of the infrastructure has been crumbling for a long time, and with the strikes and fires, it’s sort of finally reaching the end. That makes it a really exciting moment for other filmmakers like me, to make films like this with just a little money.”
Special to The Globe and Mail