Chain

You don't have to wait for the final credits of "Chain" to see that Jem Cohen was funded by the New York Foundation for the Arts as it is painfully obvious that this is an artsy New Yorker's discovery of the malling of the country and that he read "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America" by Barbara Ehrenreich as he didactically puts those quotes in his characters' mouths, as well as the other listed sources.

Cohen must not have spent a lot of time out of cities as he is shocked, shocked to discover that malls are the same the whole world over, as this picaresque tale splices together images from everywhere (like Walter Kirn's "Up in the Air" posits Airport World) that older independent stores and motels get knocked down for chain stores and suites, that less profitable chains get replaced by bigger behemoths. His insights can be attained by anyone sitting for 15 minutes in any mall food court or suburban traffic jam. He doesn't distinguish visually or sociologically between malls that are suburban downtowns to category-killers like Wal-Mart that have no modern agora at all.

The structure of this faux docudrama is intriguing. Cohen alternates monologues by two fictional characters, a runaway teenager, "Amanda" (Mira Billotte), who sees the endless consumerism of American malls as half-empty promises while doing pick-up jobs, and a Japanese company woman on a business trip, who sees the malls as half-full frozen upbeatness, which she compares to cherry blossoms falling at their peak. However, the two actresses speak with such droning monotones that I worried that they badly needed anti-depressants, though Miho Nikaido's very thick accent as "Tamiko" may excuse her lack of affect.

I kept expecting these two to meet in their final limbos but there is no such climax. A self-conscious night vision video commentary by the teen squatting in an abandoned structure looks cool, but recalls Marc Singer's urban portrait of the homeless in "Dark Days." The Japanese business woman's quest to develop a business plan that would replace a failing steel mill with an American-style amusement park she wants to call "Floating World" duplicates a notion from China that was much more effectively and ironically portrayed in "The World (Shijie)" and cross-cultural rapaciousness of the landscape was poignantly portrayed in "Japanese Story."

Cohen spends a lot of footage photographing sunrise and sunset of modern cities' profiles, to make them look futuristic as in "Code 46," suburban highwayscapes stretching into the horizon and mall signs. He does capture some amusing and poignant shots, like the birds nesting in a Sam's Place sign, with some very heavy-handed points, like a shot of the Enron symbol.

Cohen is an accomplished photographer and cinematographer but as a writer, his substance is just too weak.

I saw a rough cut of this at the Portland Experimental Film Festival, and while largely unedited, the footage I saw was some of the more honest and moving I've seen all year. While revolving around a fictional narrative, the film was shot in real locations(all of them large shopping multiplexes), and I was amazed to find out that while the filming took place in multiple countries, the common mall has become so homogenized that I could barely tell one place from another. The characters are believable, and it took me a while to figure out that it wasn't a straightforward documentary. This is a meditative, mature opus from Jem Cohen, in line with his earlier work Lost Book Found, where truth and fiction blend to compliment the overarching idea, which he stated at the screening he drew largely from ideas inspired by Walter Benjamin's "The Arcades Project." Beautiful stuff.

In a chain, one element leads to another which leads to another and there is little change from one element to the next. It is this idea that Chain portrays well. With shots of shopping malls, highways, and office parks from around the country, Chain shows how uniform American culture has become with the help of corporations. What it perhaps does better, is show beauty in the mundane. Chain is filled with scenes presenting simple beauty of breeze through a construction site, contrasting colors of parking lots at dusk, reflections in the glass of office buildings, and the graphic beauty in a confluence of stairways. The story in Chain is subtle. Two different women tell in a sometimes diary, sometimes inner voice, their personal takes on the sameness of place to place and the desires to want what you don't have. The story is almost too subtle at times, however, with the audience wishing that it would have lead to a stronger point.

This could be a compelling documentary, if it was a documentary. Most of the scenes of the characters seemed staged… because they were. I did like what I learned about the characters. We see one character struggling with homelessness and joblessness. We see the waning of the other's excitement about her corporate travel (a different kind of homelessness). I was interested in learning more about both, but the story telling is stingy. Maybe a third of the footage is of the two women. This film is very slow because there are too many shots of overweight pedestrians and too many establishing shots of parking lots, signs, and malls. Only in the credits did I realize it was not the same few malls, but since they all look the same, the bleakness added nothing but boredom.

jem cohen's fictional thing, not really a film in the expected sense since we get the moving images but not the hook and drag of narrative and not the blaat blaat splotchiness of non-narrative film.i have a fondness for his particularly aestheic, sentimental almost, because it seems so familiar to my own teenage experiences (abandoned malls, house perpetually being build in a row while old houses on the main street crumbled into disrepair. ugly disrepair.) and it is not often made, this kind of looking film, probably because it is not pleasantly ugly. i admired that he showed, without prejudice, both sides of that consumer impulse-the person who ends up working as a small piece of the huge need to make and to buy, and the person who is driven to help create the organism that houses the need. it was appropriate that the main characters are women, since women do most of the buying and, though i cannot substantiate this just this second, most of the small, poorly paid jobs. he did a good job of presenting the dialectic of materialism as it is now and a lovely job showing the images of con- and destruction we see all the time but rarely stop to look at. but what i like best about walter benjamin, who cohen thanks in the credits of the film, is that his own warmth and humanity occasionally mixes with the subjects about which he is so obviously ambivalent. while i believed the characters in chain, i didn't care for them. if jem cohen can make the kind of film which also makes me care about the people, he will be one of the few extraordinary geniuses among people.