16/05/2024 - CANNES 2024: A mute young man gets caught up with some local tough guys in the neo-noir debut from Taiwanese-US filmmaker KEFF

The tensions between the mainland and Greater China find a mirror through their fortunes in the international cinema market. In the 1990s, the most prestigious East Asian films were the Taiwanese New Wave flicks and Hong Kong’s more genre-driven output; now, the former are marginalised, whilst the latter’s industry has largely contracted. The mainland has seen a colossal boom in all sectors of the industry, for both its homegrown product and the new ardour for international, and especially Hollywood, cinema.

Locust [+see also:
trailer
film profile], directed by the mononymously named KEFF and showing in the Cannes Critics’ Week, is one of the festival’s highest-profile Taiwanese premieres in years, alongside Mongrel [+see also:
film review
film profile] in the Directors’ Fortnight, also from the island nation. The above summary is necessary to set the tone for this film’s political framing: its main setting is Taipei, but the action pointedly takes place in summer 2019, with the historic demonstrations in Hong Kong blaring over the TV and radio.

KEFF makes these questions of national solidarity, pride and belonging hang tantalisingly in the air, but the story he constructs in the foreground isn’t always worthy of them. Yet the symbolic national binary is telling: youthful Hong Kong is choosing uprising, whilst Taiwan’s young opt for both materialism and gangsterism. The mute Zhong-Han (Liu Wei-Chen) works by day at a modest eatery; when night falls, he mysteriously bands together with a squad of mob foot soldiers, accompanying them on their intimidating debt-collection runs and more elaborate armed robberies. His muteness – barely explained across the film – is an apt metaphor for this easy complicity; across the strait, the young protesters clamour for democracy, their voices defiantly raised in unison.

In spite of its competitive Cannes selection, Locust is less a typical “art” film than one might expect. Rather than its visuals, which occasionally feel a bit sterile, its carefully plotted screenplay and stock characterisations are the elements indebted to commercial Hong Kong cinema: a heightened milieu where a mute guy can incarnate a strange, heroic charisma, and a gang whose black face mask-clad assaults are choreographed like ensemble dance. Zhong-Han is given a love interest in I-Ju, a convenience store worker sensitively played by Rimong Ihwar, who dotes on him despite his not being able to fully reciprocate a single word she utters. KEFF does capture a sense of romanticism with this eccentric choice, but also deflates his work by asking these countless unreal touches to accumulate into a sturdy tone and structure.

The lease for Zhong-Han’s workplace, run by the weary and ageing Rong (Yu An-Shun), has been bought out by a property developer with mob connections; KEFF also wants to show that this corruption goes straight to the top, with all the aforementioned narrative details clicking into gear to showcase this. No sequence or development can signify and breathe solely by itself: everything is merely a narrative building block. Of course, this more classical storytelling is sometimes welcome, but its solid construction isn’t matched by an attendant fluency or dramatic tension.

Locust is a co-production by Taiwan, France and the USA, staged by Kindred Spirit and mk2 films. mk2 also handles its international sales.