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Drawing Restraint 9

2006, Movie, NR, 103 mins

Drawing Restraint 9: Review

DRAWING RESTRAINT 9
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Having completed his celebrated five-part Cremaster film cycle, artist-filmmaker Matthew Barney returned to one of his earliest projects with a ninth installment in his ongoing Drawing Restraint series. But while the majority of the previous eight were performance pieces in which Barney attempted to produce a work out of some form of physical resistance, No. 9 is very much in the Cremaster mold, a gorgeous feature that's both passing strange and undeniably beautiful. This virtually wordless film stars Barney and his wife, Icelandic pop artist Bjork, as a pair of "Occidental tourists" who arrive separately aboard the real-life Japanese whaling ship Nisshin Maru, the only factory whaler currently operating. The wife is led to a bathhouse below deck where she soaks in a tub scented by floating oranges, and is then carefully dressed in an elaborate, Shinto-inspired costume and headdress made of hide, hair, fur, bone and horn. The husband wanders into a cabin and takes a nap in front of a gilded screen while a man slips in and shaves the top of the husband's head and eyebrows. When Barney awakes, he's stripped of his clothes and dressed in a costume similar to Bjork's. Meanwhile the deck crew is hard at work: After pouring gallons of molten petroleum into a huge mold shaped like a capsule bisected by a crossbar — a symbol that appears throughout Barney's work — and waiting for it to solidify, they've hauled aboard a massive log of ambergris, the fragrant and very valuable secretion of the sperm whale that they're carefully inserting in place of the crossbar. Below, the guests are invited into a tiny cabin and served tea in an elaborate ceremony performed by their host (Sosui Oshima), who uses strange utensils found no where other than Barney's imagination. After the ceremony ends and the hosts depart, the room begins filling with tea-colored liquid. As the water reaches waist level, the guests first embrace then begin cutting the flesh from each other's legs with flensing knives. What's left below their waists takes the shape of aquatic tails, and blowholes appear on their backs. As bizarre as the events and images sound, one is left feeling like a witness to a love story between both humankind and nature and, of course, between Barney and Bjork. Singular artists whose visions find their fullest expression on film and video — and whose haunting, evocative score ranges from traditional song to raw a cappella to electronic, otherworldly vespers — their sensibilities are perfectly matched. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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