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.

Reveling in the symbolic, Barney extracts myths from all things and interconnects them where you never imagined there was a connection. At the beginning of "Drawing Restraint 9," which was filmed in Nagasaki and on board the whaling ship Nisshin Maru, Barney splices together shots of busy construction workers, overhead shots of the city and traditional dancers celebrating the approach of a tanker truck between gigantic silos. The repetition of motion in each shot and the composition of diverse elements is mesmerizing, making you believe in the possibility of a logical relation between them. His eye here is impeccable, and backed by rhythmic music composed by Bjork, what lies ahead seems strange and promising.

The movie then introduces four main "characters": the Nisshin Maru; a sculptural mold on its deck in the shape of a cross with rounded ends (the symbol of the "Cremaster Series" ); a male (Barney); and a female (Bjork). After the mold is filled with liquid from the tanker truck, the Nisshin Maru heads to sea and Barney and Bjork get in separate boats that converge on the ship.

This is standard Barney territory -- unexplained characters are headed for a unexplained meeting. And in the first half of the movie, he skillfully sets up an atmosphere of alienation by juxtaposing these unexplained characters in the midst of a familiar world of cities, ships and workmen.

While unclear symbolism abounds in the movie, it isn't until Bjork and Barney reach the Nisshin Maru that it becomes overly belabored and self-involved. As the two are led to different rooms on the ship in anticipation of some approaching ritual, they experience arbitrary preparations -- Barney's head is shaved and fitted with broken horns, Bjork takes a hot bath with lemons and has her eyebrows shaved off. They then are both attired in giant fur coats with massive shells on their backs.

Barney is obsessed with textures and fabrics, organic forms and membranes, and this makes for a stimulating visual experience. But more attention should have been paid to pace and momentum as the steps that bring Bjork and Barney's characters together drag what was a fresh start into a claustrophobic corner.

Certainly it is partly on purpose; on board the ship, we are confined in small rooms, except for occasional shots of the exterior. But the aforementioned tea ceremony brings the movie to a virtual standstill. First, it is is unnecessarily long, and slow. And second, Bjork and Barney finally speak (her in Icelandic and him in nasal English) to what turns out to be their Japanese host/guide (Ogawa).

This simply breaks the spell that has been cast. Up to this point, the movie has created a new world out of a smart mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar. The Japanese backdrop adds to the central story, because there originally is no apparent connection. But once you realize that the couple are respectful guests in a foreign land, the premise falls away, and you feel as if you are simply watching two quirkily dressed artists enjoying a new cultural experience -- making the use of Japan and Japanese culture seem like a cheat.

At first Japan was simply a neutral backdrop. But the tea ceremony feels like the appropriation of Japanese culture as a shorthand for the exotic, for an almost mythical universe. And, accordingly, the next scene plays out like the climax of a book by popular Japanese author Haruki Murakami, in which the only way to come to grips with your inner demons is to physically rip them out.

Only here it is done in the name of repairing the damage that Japanese whaling has done to the world's whale population. And while that is a noble message, I wonder if it is too much of a hot-button real-world issue to add anything to Barney's bizarre menagerie of male, female and androgynous creatures in the midst of primal transformations.

Barney has said to the Australian newspaper The Age that "[the cremaster theme] is about how you can keep a fertile idea from becoming overdetermined and dead. So, it's very much an extended metaphor on the creative process." Unfortunately, as his body of work increases, simply cutting and pasting foreign cultures doesn't keep him ahead of the creative game. But perhaps the real difficulty is that when your starting point is the disconcertingly strange, you've set a difficult standard for yourself to surpass.