As with reading all comments, you will find it useful to know where the writer is placed. I have watched the first "Cremaster" and Barney's entry in the "Destricted" compilation. That latter piece was a failure in my mind. There's not much overlap between the sculptural and the cinematic anyway. One is more on the noun side, the other on the verb side: contextual, environmental. I admire that he tried to find that commonality in the erotic, but the result is rather sophomoric in all but the initial choices.
This isn't wonderful either. I hold hope for the later "Cremaster" experiences, that there will be some valuable conversation between us. This is a wholly different thing altogether. This man has found his love, and has created a valentine. Its a conversation, an intercourse between the two of them. The value we are expected to get is in witnessing rather than participating.
The forms he has chosen are all Japanese because they have developed an observational distance with the ordinary things of their life we do not have.
The basic urge here is the melding of the two lives: Bjarney, but with careful, artificial constraints. We have the merging of the tea ceremony with the whaling ritual; the reversal of rendering blubber to whaleoil to the coagulation of pseudoblubber from pseudowhaleoil.
We have the melding of humans with whales, ambergris with pearls, constructing whale icons with consumption...
And of course the conflating of Barney's sculptural objects with Japanese ritualistic ones. I am not well enough versed in details of Japanese esoterica to know where one starts and the other stops, but I suppose in his view it is perfectly balanced, one "restraining" the other; one "drawing" the other, each drawing restraints on another level: tea to whale and so on.
The most engaging sequence is at the beginning: three phenomenal episodes: one the wrapping of two packages, bodies; a second the procession of the whale oil returned and ritual construction thereupon; and finally a dive into the water seeking marine truth, revealing a hot blade (seen later as the humans transform into whales).
Its not for us, they made this. Its a conversation of love and commitment between the two. We've only crew members.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.
