There is a scene near the end of Matthew Barney's new movie "Drawing Restraint 9" where your greatest fears about the film come true. And no, it isn't a typical moment of blood-saturated transformation as in his "Cremaster Series" -- it's actually before the knives come out.
It's just a tea ceremony with Barney, his real-life girlfriend Bjork and the Japanese actor Tomoyuki Ogawa. It's at this point when the film's cultural appropriation becomes too much and it's mysterious spell is broken.
Barney has built his career on a series of art movies in which strange and freakish characters meet in iconic locations -- New York City's Chrysler Building, The Isle of Man, Budapest Opera House -- and interact in symbolic, ritualistic ways. Philosophically and aesthetically the movies are inspired by the cremaster, a muscle found in both male and female genitalia. Thus his films often deal with sexual differentiation -- the process of something becoming male or female, of moving from a lack of identity to a definite one.
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