Welcome to the Chrysler: Going Up! By John Anderson STAFF WRITER May 15, 2002 MOVIE REVIEW (3 1/2 STARS) CREMASTER 3 (U). If you see only one "Cremaster" this summer... The latest and purportedly last in plastic/conceptual/film artist Matthew Barney's cycle of experimental comedies. With Barney, Richard Serra, Aimee Mullins, the Order of the Rainbow for Girls. Written and directed by Matthew Barney. 3:02 (nudity, gore and adult ... situations?). At Film Forum, 209 W. Houston St., Manhattan. Matthew Barney does with the male anatomy what Georgia O'Keefe did with the female. Everything's a flower, in other words. As long as you think it is. Or, the Chrysler Building. Playing fast and loose with that most beautiful and certainly most phallic of edifices gracing the Manhattan skyline, Barney eschews the more oblique approach he took in previous "Cremasters," going right for the crotch. All the movies in this now-concluded cycle have been inescapably linked with potency, fertility, duality and obscurity - the last, to an almost maddening degree - simply by virtue of their common title (the cremaster muscle being the one that lowers and raises the testicles). Even when Barney had us watching a couple dance the Texas Two-Step (in "Cremaster 2"), the suggestion was that we were watching a couple dance the, uh, Texas Two-Step. With "3," there's less obscurity, more potency, certainly more beauty. Which brings us back to the Chrysler Building, to which Barney returns repeatedly. "Cremaster 3," like its predecessors - which were released 4, 1, 5, 2 - is not narrative, or even linear, but does have a thematic coherence (despite the occasional image that Barney seems to throw in just because it's gorgeous). What the films also do is draw not just visual but verbal connections - but never conclusions. Barney is always suggesting, with his often stunning, fetishistically immaculate imagery, the variety of interpretations available in the gap between picture and word, what the words mean and how they come to embody the associations we assign to them. Wittgenstein meets Freud meets Claes Oldenberg meets fascist imagery based on a cross, leapfrog to Christ then Chrysler; flayed pacers in harness on a racetrack (Barney's most voluptuosly grotestesue image), bringing us back to horsepower, which brings us back to Lexington Avenue and 43rd Street, and inside the workings of a building taken at its most metaphorical. If Barney is playing a character sabotaging the skyscraper's elevator system, is he giving the whole place a vasectomy? For that matter, are the '60s-era Imperials smashing into the vintage '30s auto in the Chrysler lobby representative of a David Cronenberg-"Crash"-style commentary on the mechanization of passion? Or is it more about patricide on a cellular level, the implied destruction of generations of potential organisms through the simple replenishing/renewal of product? Are we reading too much into this? Probably not, because as precious as Barney's antics seem to sometimes be, what's always going on is the dialectic between the skeptical viewer and his questioning self. It has to make sense, doesn't it? Not necessarily. The movie's opening sequences with that giant and that leprechaun and the wine-dark, windswept sea all imply the primeval origins of humankind itself, a humankind who can build and then fetishize a Chrysler Building for what it suggests about the very messy biology those same humans both obsess about and try to escape. On the other hand, the extended sequence involving Guinness stout, Celtic harps, Irish singing and potatoes being sliced with the heel of a shoe doesn't seem to have much to do with the Chrysler Building and everything to do with the earlier fantasy sequence (the tiny sheep are a nice touch) and an Irishness more lamely than potently comic. But once the reproductive seed of suggestion has been planted in the viewer's mind, almost everything starts to conform. It may be that Matthew Barney is preoccupied with sex. Or it may be that it's us. And it may be that's the point. Copyright © 2002, Newsday, Inc.