Drawing Restraint 9 Review

April 6, 2006 9:57 AM
by [email]

Provocative and inscrutable. What else would you expect from Matthew Barney?

Drawing Restraint 9, the latest from the creator of the Cremaster Cycle, is a collaboration between Barney and his wife Bjork. If you don’t know Barney, his PR materials describe him as “a visual artist whose ambitious, rigorous multi-media work encodes esoteric meaning while providing lushly immediate aesthetic rewards.”

In other words, you generally don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about, but it looks cool. Oh, and he really likes goo.

The central characters in DR9 are Barney and Bjork, though the real “star” is the Japanese vessel the Nisshin Maru, the only operating factory whaling ship in the world and where most of the film takes place.

DR9 opens with the meticulous and beautiful wrapping of two presents. In this scene, we first see a symbolic shape that reoccurs in many forms throughout: a narrow oval bisected by a thin bar. The shape is reminiscent of a whale; yet each time it appears, the center strip is eventually removed, which is probably symbolic of the removal of barriers (or….wait for it…restraints).

After this point, DR9 moves back and forth between various storylines, not all of which get mention here.

One storyline involves the construction of a metal vat on the deck of the ship, in the recurring whale-like shape. The vat is filled with liquid Vaseline which, over the course of the movie, slowly solidifies. This sounds boring as all get out, but is actually quite fascinating.

Conterminously, Barney and Bjork arrive on board by separate means and are then led through an elaborate bathing, grooming and dressing process. Finally dressed in more layers and animal parts than two self-respecting Eskimos, they come together and are joined by the captain for a complicated tea ceremony. In the only spoken scene in the movie, the captain explains the Nisshin Maru’s rather fascinating history.

Back on deck, near solidification has occurred. The center strip is removed and replaced by a large piece of (probably) coral that looks like either a flipperless whale, or a giant turd: earlier, this whale/turd was “caught” by whalers, in the process disturbing some oddly dressed pearl divers, and dragged back to the Nisshin Maru in the same manner smaller whaling vessels capture the beasts and return them to the Nisshin for processing.

Later, the vat’s metal barriers are removed and the semi-solid Vaseline gloops over the deck. Ship workers cut it up and dump it into the furnace, where it melts and starts to bubble over, running through the ship like something reminiscent of a more liquidy version of the Blob.

Barney and Bjork are now alone and start making out as the liquid Vaseline floods their room. Then, when the room is filled waist high and the liquid starts to congeal, they take flensing knives and cut off each other’s feet and thighs. Oh and then they develop blowholes, while traces of an early whale tail replace their lower limbs. Confused yet? Join the party.

Throughout, the visuals, other than the flensing scene, are stunning; while Barney seems to have a moral objection to coherent narrative flow, he is a visual master. Unfortunately, his climatic slasher scene is anything but, and is instead unintentionally reminiscent of a 60’s B-grade horror film.

In other news, Bjork’s soundtrack is sometimes mesmerizing and beautiful, other times the equivalent of Quint running his fingernails down the chalkboard in Jaws. Luckily, the former predominates.

For the first two-thirds, DR9 threatens to make sense and Barney’s entrancing scenes enthrall. Overall, however, the movie is too long and drifts wildly in the last third, becoming visually and orally unappealing: human attention span lasts only so long and the rough finale jars you out of the surreal magic you were enjoying.

If you are moved by evocative imagery and have the patience for Barney’s style, you will appreciate DR9. Even though flawed and too long, it is worth a look for anyone with a interest in aesthetics because of Barney’s unmatched artistic cinematography.