Change Your Image
vbaish
Reviews
Chain (2004)
a few words about the film
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.