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.
10 Reviews
Contemplative film about lonely lives in urban landscapes, worldwide.
GunnerRunner7 February 2006
Though I watched this film only on TV, I was easily hypnotized by its beautiful pictures, its timing, and its sound. It's like a James Benning film with people in it. The film doesn't hurry you to get familiar with its two female characters and to take part in their lives. It might feel boring. But it might also feel just like your own situation or that of your friends. Modern society and its spaces, especially the urban landscapes (that look the same in each part of the world, we learn) are dissected and so reveal their lack of individual features that could people to identify with their habitat. You can use the time that the film gives you to become aware of this, and then go out and change your life to something meaningful. Which also might mean, that you have to leave before the film ends. In the credits you learn that everything was staged. Does it make a difference? Nope. I liked it very much.
a few words about the film
vbaish17 October 2005
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.
Beauty in the Mundane
cshap20013 February 2005
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.
Chain
efeedor16 April 2006
Warning: Spoilers
Jem Cohen's Chain is an interesting conceit; like the Christopher Guest films, it pretends to be a documentary, but unlike those blatantly fraudulent comedies, you do not know Chain is fiction until the ending credits and even then, you do not know to what extent.
The "plot," of which there is not much, involves the supposedly parallel lives of two women, a homeless and jobless teenage runaway named Amanda (Mira Billotte) who lives in a mall in the environs of Albany, New York, and Tamiko (Miho Nikaido), a middle-class (?) Japanese-American businesswoman whose entire existence seems to be devoted to an unnamed company that doesn't seem to repay Tamiko with the same devotion.
The film cuts back and fourth between interviews of the two, who never meet nor intersect in any way. Both seem to be zombies of "the system" and offer up lengthy, dry, uninteresting anecdotes spoken almost entirely in monotone. You see them speak while "interviewed" sometimes (especially with Amanda, who films herself in a night vision video-letter that's meant for her estranged half-sister with a digital camera Amanda's found), but clips of their environments are usually imposed over the audio.
These clips, filmed by Mr. Cohen on an old Bolex camera are often very beautiful compositions, but that is not always the case. (And I'm not speaking exclusively of the shots of decrepit buildings and the seedy, impoverished, abandoned parts of town; many of those are both well composed and effective.) Unfortunately, the images are better suited for photographs that you can look on for as long as you personally desire than for a feature-length film which makes you a captive of the theater for ninety-nine minutes.
It is important to note that the slowness is entirely intentional; Mr. Cohen said specifically that he intended not for his film to be boring, but to be "frustrating." This is good technique; frustrating is what the lives of the two characters are: frustrating, dull and inescapable, though they themselves are neither fully capable of knowing it nor fleeing from it.
The characters, to me, represented the poor souls you see ambling aimlessly through the bad sections of town; the people "we" never pay attention to, the people we try not to look at. Unfortunately, Chain almost seems to justify our unwillingness to look at them. These wanderers are dullards without an interesting word to say.
I acknowledge that Mr. Cohen did not intend for us to develop feelings for the characters just as much as he did intend for the film to be frustrating to watch. I guess the movie's point is that it's no fun to be in Amanda or Tamiko's shoes, but maybe if Mr. Cohen showed that people trapped in the system are still people, I'd have been more receptive to their plight. (Even if these characters aren't meant to be likable as such, I doubt we were supposed to think ill of or condemn them.) But maybe that these people have lost their humanity is his point and Chain is just a misanthropic movie.
I appreciate Mr. Cohen's experiment, but if a viewer goes into the movie not knowing that Chain is not a documentary and is so enervated by it's boringness that they slip away before the credits roll, they'd have no idea that the movie was an experiment at all, and that is the film's most interesting element. Even after watching the credits and being full knowledgeable that Mr. Cohen was known for blending reality with fiction in his films, I wouldn't have fully understood that the film was entirely fiction until he, who was at the screening in person, discussed it.
It is a credit to his ability as a realistic writer that he can have us so well fooled, but a detriment to his skills as a director that he has no interest in stimulating the audience.
The "plot," of which there is not much, involves the supposedly parallel lives of two women, a homeless and jobless teenage runaway named Amanda (Mira Billotte) who lives in a mall in the environs of Albany, New York, and Tamiko (Miho Nikaido), a middle-class (?) Japanese-American businesswoman whose entire existence seems to be devoted to an unnamed company that doesn't seem to repay Tamiko with the same devotion.
The film cuts back and fourth between interviews of the two, who never meet nor intersect in any way. Both seem to be zombies of "the system" and offer up lengthy, dry, uninteresting anecdotes spoken almost entirely in monotone. You see them speak while "interviewed" sometimes (especially with Amanda, who films herself in a night vision video-letter that's meant for her estranged half-sister with a digital camera Amanda's found), but clips of their environments are usually imposed over the audio.
These clips, filmed by Mr. Cohen on an old Bolex camera are often very beautiful compositions, but that is not always the case. (And I'm not speaking exclusively of the shots of decrepit buildings and the seedy, impoverished, abandoned parts of town; many of those are both well composed and effective.) Unfortunately, the images are better suited for photographs that you can look on for as long as you personally desire than for a feature-length film which makes you a captive of the theater for ninety-nine minutes.
It is important to note that the slowness is entirely intentional; Mr. Cohen said specifically that he intended not for his film to be boring, but to be "frustrating." This is good technique; frustrating is what the lives of the two characters are: frustrating, dull and inescapable, though they themselves are neither fully capable of knowing it nor fleeing from it.
The characters, to me, represented the poor souls you see ambling aimlessly through the bad sections of town; the people "we" never pay attention to, the people we try not to look at. Unfortunately, Chain almost seems to justify our unwillingness to look at them. These wanderers are dullards without an interesting word to say.
I acknowledge that Mr. Cohen did not intend for us to develop feelings for the characters just as much as he did intend for the film to be frustrating to watch. I guess the movie's point is that it's no fun to be in Amanda or Tamiko's shoes, but maybe if Mr. Cohen showed that people trapped in the system are still people, I'd have been more receptive to their plight. (Even if these characters aren't meant to be likable as such, I doubt we were supposed to think ill of or condemn them.) But maybe that these people have lost their humanity is his point and Chain is just a misanthropic movie.
I appreciate Mr. Cohen's experiment, but if a viewer goes into the movie not knowing that Chain is not a documentary and is so enervated by it's boringness that they slip away before the credits roll, they'd have no idea that the movie was an experiment at all, and that is the film's most interesting element. Even after watching the credits and being full knowledgeable that Mr. Cohen was known for blending reality with fiction in his films, I wouldn't have fully understood that the film was entirely fiction until he, who was at the screening in person, discussed it.
It is a credit to his ability as a realistic writer that he can have us so well fooled, but a detriment to his skills as a director that he has no interest in stimulating the audience.
I did not find mall parking lots beautiful
mgleez8 February 2005
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.
Hermetic (if you don't know what that means, this film is not for you)
jimcheva7 February 2005
Warning: Spoilers
NOTE: I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT WOULD CONSTITUTE A SPOILER FOR A FILM LIKE THIS. BUT JUST IN CASE ANY OF THE FOLLOWING FACTS SURPRISE ANYONE..
Here's how the film looks in conventional terms: two alternating voice-overs - one in a distinct Japanese accent, the other in a rather weary middle American voice - tell details (more or less important, on the surface at least) of the speakers' lives, over images of them and various malls, motels, other sterile, anonymous environments. One is a young Japanese businesswoman, the other a lost young marginal woman who seems to have run away from home (after ripping off her mother and sister.) What is their connection? Why do they tell us what they do? Is there even meant to be a narrative thread? If you don't even need to know that sort of thing, or enjoy turning a film around and around like an icy aesthetic object trying to figure out exactly what it means, you might find this very exciting. (Did you like Gus Van Sant's "Elephant"? You'll LOVE this.) Me, I kept wondering why I was still there.
Here's how the film looks in conventional terms: two alternating voice-overs - one in a distinct Japanese accent, the other in a rather weary middle American voice - tell details (more or less important, on the surface at least) of the speakers' lives, over images of them and various malls, motels, other sterile, anonymous environments. One is a young Japanese businesswoman, the other a lost young marginal woman who seems to have run away from home (after ripping off her mother and sister.) What is their connection? Why do they tell us what they do? Is there even meant to be a narrative thread? If you don't even need to know that sort of thing, or enjoy turning a film around and around like an icy aesthetic object trying to figure out exactly what it means, you might find this very exciting. (Did you like Gus Van Sant's "Elephant"? You'll LOVE this.) Me, I kept wondering why I was still there.
The Endless Malling of the World in Soft Focus
noralee30 September 2005
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.
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.
Almost as entertaining as unconsciousness
yunns22 August 2008
I really had high hopes for this movie. In the description this film appeared to be one of the off-beat-but-poignant films that I love. However, this proved not to be the case. From the drawn-out opening scene until the anti-climactic end, "Chain" was about as exciting as watching paint sit in a can...it doesn't even warrant an "about as interesting as watching paint dry." When paint is left to dry, something may actually happen; bugs may get stuck in the paint or it could dry a weird color. The majority of this plot-lacking film was spent on pieced shots of random people in malls that could not even be considered a decent attempt at montage. It was as if I was watching a television switch channels on the life-is-dull-jump-out-of-your-window- network. I enjoy spending days in public places and love to watch strangers interact, scenes change and life progress. There is beauty in the mundane. But, apparently no one told this film crew who seemed determined to stage what should be spontaneous and ignores what should be staged. The idea behind this despairing maze of commercialism is a brilliant one; the execution is severely lacking.
Poor comparison by someone who doesn't get it.
eviltimes28 August 2008
Endless shots of malls and hotels. The annoying student art film of Jem Cohen, better known for REM videos. Here are the allegedly parallel stories of a 31 year old Japanese business woman scouting for investment partners in the US for her "Corporation", verses a homeless American teenage runaway girl's travails. The Japanese woman's timid behavior towards her Corporate bosses is part of their society, and cannot be compared to the stupidity and laziness of the American girl. The Japanese woman has a future, the American girl could easily end up a prostitute. Now take this simple story and fill in about a hour's worth of footage of corporate chain stores (KFC, McDonalds, Marriot, etc) from Australia to Germany and I think our film maker found a way for various film companies to pay for his world wide vacation spree. Zero stars.
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