Film and video artist Jem Cohen traces a hypnotic journey through shopping malls and other places that invite consumption and foster alienation. Chain was his first feature-length fiction film with a certain dose of documentary. Cohen's narrative prioritizes meditation over dynamism. These qualities are linked to the Finnish film Nobody Meets Your Eyes, where director Jesse Jalonen offers a reflection on people who live invisible in the eyes of society, unless they are recorded with a camera or microphone.
This idea of absence and presence is portrayed in Chain through two apparently independent narratives, but which Cohen links by the hand of two women trapped in this “super-landscape” globalized by hotel chains, restaurant franchises and airports. On the one hand, Mira Billotte gives life to Amanda, an American nomad who survives on precarious jobs. And on the other hand, actress Miho Nikaido (this will ring a bell for diehard Hal Hartley fans), plays Tomiko, a Japanese woman who analyzes amusement parks in the United States. Both move through the same impersonal, consumer-oriented spaces, although they appropriate them with perceptions as different as their respective origins and social classes.
Jem Cohen shows how our vision of society is influenced by our place within it. The poetic tone of the film is even more plausible when Cohen dedicates it to filmmakers Humphrey Jennings and Chris Marker, whose works echo in the haze of these urban landscapes. MARCOS CASAD