River of Fundament

For all the gnashing of conservative teeth over the screening of American artist Matthew Barney’s 300 minute epic, River of Fundament, at the Adelaide Festival on Sunday, there’s little about the film that’s genuinely shocking – save for its objectified and often abject portrayal of women – unless one is particularly uncomfortable with some of the human body’s baser functions.

Defecation and ejaculation, rebirth and decay feature prominently in the film, as do sumptuously shot visions of urban decay, and Barney’s ongoing fascination with the American automobile industry: the 1967 Chrysler Imperial that was a central motif of his third Cremaster film reappears, here evoking Sir James Fraser’s myth of the regularly and ritually sacrificed Sacred King: the new model supplanting the old.

Myth is central to the film, which is a loose, operatic adaptation of Norman Mailer’s poorly received 1983 novel Ancient Evenings, an exploration of sex, death and reincarnation in a fictionalised Ancient Egypt. ‘Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state,’ the book begins, a message which Barney has embraced wholeheartedly, though at length, in his film.

Over three parts, screened consecutively, River of Fundament explores the death, mutilation and resurrection of the god Osiris, murdered and dismembered by his brother Set and bought back to life by his sister-wife Isis. The film’s version of Norman Mailer also seeks resurrection, and a significant part of the film plays out at an interminable dinner party set in an exacting recreation of the late author’s apartment, where New York intelligentsia such as Salman Rushdie and Jeffrey Eugenides hold a wake for the dead Mailer, even as his reincarnated soul slowly ascends from a river of filth far below the house.

Some of the film’s imagery is truly spectacular and enacted on a massive scale – Mailer’s house floats down the Hudson River on a barge; industrial furnaces fed by an army of toiling workers spit sparks and spew out the molten and dismembered remains of Osiris/the Chrysler Imperial; a car is feted in a vibrant Latino ceremony – and even its more intimate moments are beautifully filmed by Director of Photography Peter Strietmann, such as a scene where Mailer’s spirit (played by Barney himself) carefully wraps a human turd in gold foil before being symbolically buggered by the gilded prick of the Pharaoh Usermare (Stephen Payne).  

But beauty is not enough to hold one’s attention in a project of this nature, which as well as feeling overly self-important – an extended celebration of the Artist as God – also smacks of misogyny.

Throughout the film, women exist only to serve men: as sex objects, as mothers, as supportive wives. They are penetrated and desired, oiled, oogled and oozing. Even when played by the likes of actors Maggie Gyllenhaal and Ellen Burstyn, or Paralympian Aimee Mullins, they lack agency and independence. It’s this aspect of the film, rather than its over-extended running time, occasional violence and sporadic attention to bodily functions, which truly discomforted this viewer.

Rating: 3 stars out of 5