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Bjork upstages Harrison Ford with Vaseline and a whaling ship
By Hugh Davies in Venice
(Filed: 03/09/2005) The crazy world of Bjork proved to be so outrageous at the Venice Film Festival yesterday that she upstaged an appearance by Harrison Ford holding the hand of Calista Flockhart.
The Hollywood stars, a romantic item for some years now, were in Italy for the unveiling of Fragile, a horror film featuring the former Ally McBeal actress. However, they were virtually ignored by the paparazzi, while the Icelandic singer took the event by storm with her new movie, a 135-minute epic shot in Japan in which she stars with a vast vat filled with thousands of gallons of Vaseline. As an over-the-top experimental picture, it even made Ang Lee's daring new movie Brokeback Mountain look tame, despite the appearance of Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhall as gay Wyoming cowboys. Bjork, in scarlet high-heeled boots and a pink dress, arrived in Venice with her boyfriend, Matthew Barney. She said: "I happen to be an emotional person. It's been hard work, and I don't know what's going to happen with the film. It's kind of scary, but I love it." Drawing Restraint 9 follows Bjork's appearance in the cult director Lars von Trier's film Dancer In The Dark. But the new picture is far more weird. It emanated from the imagination of Barney, a San Francisco-born artist, who hired the mothership of the Japanese whaling fleet, the Nisshin Maru, to sail in Nagasaki Bay with a huge steel basin on deck. Sailors spent hours filling the basin with Vaseline poured in through hosepipes. According to the script, the idea was to use the petroleum jelly to show the "relationship between self-imposed resistance and creativity" by transforming it into a "vast sculpture", called The Field, which is "moulded, poured, bisected and reformed" on the ship over the course of the film. With the jelly congealing, cracking and moving with the sea, the movie "tracks the descent of form into states of sensual surrender and formal atrophy". But many critics attending the film festival were baffled, and at a press screening the sound of seats flipping up as viewers left the cinema began early. I lasted for 90 minutes, watching the tedious process of Bjork and Barney, identified as "The Guests", arriving on the vessel and being dressed as a Shinto couple in mammal fur costumes by geisha girls. It was all so slow - with virtually no dialogue, but some soothing background sounds and songs - that the odd snore could be heard in the air-conditioned cinema. Unfortunately, I missed what the publicity material called "a harrowing liebestod" in which Bjork and her partner became "locked in an embrace" as they "breathed through blowhole-like orifices on the back of their necks". They then took out "flensing knives" to "cut away each other's feet and thighs". The script said: "The remains of their lower body are revealed to contain traces of whale tails at an early stage of development, suggesting rebirth, physical transformation, and the possibility of new forms. "Having reached a state of maximum disintegration, the sculpture of The Field is then reorganised and the ship emerges from a storm, sailing through a field of icebergs towards the open southern ocean." The two stars are then seen as a pair of whales, swimming behind the ship, heading for Antarctica. At a media conference, one Italian journalist said that she had been so moved "that I want to watch it over and over again". However, others were less enthusiastic. Bjork was immensely upbeat about the film, with Barney, the subject of a recent Guggenheim retrospective in New York, equally wrapped up in what the producers described as his "hermetic vision". Asked what the couple plans to do next, Bjork said: "I haven't a clue." Barney was more specific, saying that he wanted to become "more experimental". This would be with a film in which he sets up a trampoline in a room with him - and presumably her - jumping up and down to make marks on a ceiling that would develop into a "sensual" work of art.
hdavies@telegraph.co.uk |
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