There’s a rumor that if you make it through “Drawing Restraint 9” (which opens March 29 at the IFC Center), Matthew Barney’s art project set to Bjork’s music, you get a certificate declaring you’re a Very Intelligent Person. All I got, however, were giggle fits as I imagined Starbucks intellectuals and uncomfortable couples on dates struggling to keep their eyes open during this 135-minute art flick.

The movie opens with a long scene of two fossils being gift-wrapped. When the final ribbon is tied, you figure it’s time for lunch, but instead the film cuts to the crew of the Nisshin Maru, Japan’s last factory whaling vessel. The crew is building a holding tank on the deck for 25 tons of Vaseline.

The crew is a good-humored, long-suffering bunch who prove that they’re game for anything: Eating jelly-shrimp desserts shaped like Barney’s vitrines, throwing harpoons at sacks full of shrimp shells, and hauling abstract sculptures out of the sea. (One assumes they were also game for cleaning up the 25 tons of goo left on the deck after the artists decamp for the Guggenheim.)

B&B arrive on the Nisshin Maru, get dressed in elaborate kimonos made of dead animals, and go to a tea ceremony. At some point after her eyebrows are shaved – but before she develops a blowhole in the back of her neck – Bjork, along with the audience, clearly runs out of patience for Mr. Barney’s artsy antics. And yet this film leaves the viewer with the question of whether ritual and restraint are necessarily inimical to ritualized creativity. Not really. But that’s how “Drawing Restraint 9” will get you thinking. The question I left with was: How long will it take for their eyebrows to grow back?

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