Fur: Un portrait imaginaire de Diane Arbus

I would be delighted if the Arbus estate, after having seen this film, commission a film called "The True Life of Diane Arbus" with an ending in the same vein as the film portrait of Sylvia Plath.

My feeling, and it is only that, Ms Arbus was never timid in her photography of people. Nor were the people on the fringe of society organised in the way the film suggests they were.

If you like lingering shots of Ms Kidman and enjoy bubblegum for the eyes then do go and see it. If, on the other hand, and that was my motive for going to see the film, you wish to learn more about a talented photographer of worth, then your cinema ticket price might be better spent on a book about Diane Arbus.

Being lucky enough to have a free pass for the press this morning I attended the press screening of this film at the Roma Film Festival, which opened today. I would like to share some thoughts. First of all, this is far from being a biographical account of the photographer Diane Arbus. The film, with shows not a single of her works, just covers the few key months in which Arbus discovered to be an artist, leaving her well-to-do environment. One day ante litteram desperate housewife Arbus, married with the mild mannered advertising photographer Allan, looking outside the window sees Lionel, their new neighbour: this is the beginning of the most unusual of love stories, around which the whole film revolves. Lionel, which is an entirely fictional character, suffers from ipertrichosis, a pathological condition which makes his body and his face completely covered with hair. Lionel helps Arbus to discover herself and introduce her to the world of the freaks, like himself is, which would be the subject of most of her work. The title of the film states it is an imaginary portrait of the artist. It's more like a wild fantasy loosely inspired to her figure. Kidman's performance is good, but not mind-blowing. Robert Downey Jr.'s is more interesting: with his face completely covered with hair he manage to create a rather intriguing character, acting just with his eyes and his beautiful voice. I must say that after the screening the press audience was pretty harsh with the film. It's not really a BAD movie, one can say that in its way it has also a kind of weird charm. Steven Shainberg's direction is creative and interesting. Still, the film has many very weak points. There are really A LOT of unintentionally funny things, first of all the striking resemblance between Robert Downey Jr.'s character and Star Wars hairy fellow Chewbacca. Two or there meant to be serious lines made the audience (and me) laugh out loud. A few scenes were nearly ridiculous. If you are a fan of Kidman or Downey Jr. you can give a chance to this film: don't expect a serious work about Diane Arbus, but rather a very strange dream, and maybe you'll enjoy it. 6/10

Had I taken to heart what the movie reviewer in my local paper had written about this film (and his 2.5 star rating) -- I would not have gone. Fortunately, I checked out IMDb and read that someone had compared it to Jean Cocteau's avant-garde "La Belle et La Bete." Enough said. That commendation, and armed, as I was, with the knowledge that Nicole Kidman has done some exceptional films in recent years (particularly "The Hours," "The Others," and one of my all-time favourite psychological thrillers, "Dead Calm"), I was off to the local art film theatre to join the sparse (perhaps a dozen?) audience of viewers.

In short, this film has set the bar extremely high re: all other films I will see in 2007. One finds not only the influence of Cocteau in the film, but also of Kubrick, Hitchcock, and even of Maya Deren. (ie: there is a stunning image of Kidman/Arbus crawling out of the sea -- a few moments of sheer poetry -- that are reminiscent of Deren's "At Land.") (Also, perhaps a little Jane Campion with the underwater shots near the end.)

This is a decidedly painterly film, with everything from Arbus's dresses to the evocative interiors of Lionel's museum/carnival-like apartment and the film's textures worthy of commentary in both film classes and post-film chats with friends. Contrasts are integral to this film. The paint-peeled walls provide an interesting contrast with the elegant satins and aristocratic dining accoutrement (tea pot, cup), and parallel Lionel's declining health. Arbus's smooth skin vs. Lionel's fur. The staged symmetry of Arbus's husband's white-washed, commercial photography vs. the brilliant chaos in Lionel's apartment. Arbus's wealthy, "proper" parents vs. Lionel's menagerie of "freaks". Many of the shots are framed in interesting, geometrical or architectural ways, or echo camera apertures. The use of the colour blue in some scenes is breathtaking.

Great line -- (not verbatim): Allan Arbus -- "I'm a normal guy, now I have a hole in my ceiling and freaks coming through it."

I also felt the chemistry between the principal characters (a rarity), and believe the pacing greatly attributed to the overall success of the film. The framing -- with the nudist camp -- underscored the change/growth in the protagonist.

As my 20 year old daughter said upon leaving the theatre -- "This is the kind of film that really makes you want to live the life you were meant to." Here here. "Fur" gets five big, bold, blazing stars. It is, quite simply, brilliant. Please, tell your friends.

Defying biopic clichés and overlapping reality and fantasy - so that the viewer eventually hardly understands what's real and what's not - "Fur" is definitely a provocative movie, not only another version of "The Beauty and the Beast". The odd subject is handled with impeccable effects and a stunning acting, the obvious question is asked by a HUGE metaphor - what's better between a man covered with fur and snobbish people wearing fur? Truly intriguing the film has some stasis moments that prevent it from being excellent, nevertheless it's about an interesting story, certainly worth viewing. Plus it gives a singular and also metaphorical finale showing Kidman removing her clothing along with her "social vestment".

Any instance in which a filmmaker attempts to blend ideas of fact with fiction - especially when that particular fact is fairly well known and tied to an iconic historical figure - they're going to have problems in maintaining a connection with certain factions of their audience. Just look at some previous examples of this same stylistic device in other films; such as Dreamchild (1985) for instance, in which an elderly Alice Liddell reflects on her time spent with Lewis Carroll and his obsessive compulsion to nail her character to the very pages of his most celebrated work. Even more polarising was David Cronenberg's adaptation of the cult novel Naked Lunch (1991), in which elements of the author's life and works were blended together to create a torturous, darkly-comic and highly homo-erotic trek through the damaged psychological territory of a Burroughs-like bug exterminator. A similar approach was also used by director Steven Sodebergh and screenwriter Lem Dobbs with their coolly expressionistic merging of the fantastical and horrific writings of Kafka (1991), with the more mundane, everyday-like tedium of his real life and work.

Fur (2006), which makes its intentions clear with the subtitle "an imaginary portrait of Diane Arbus", takes on a similar approach to the films aforementioned; blending elements of personal fact and actual biographical detail with a story that is pure, fairy tale fabrication. Having watched the film just a few days ago, I browsed the Internet for previous reviews to get a sense of how other audiences had approached it. In doing so, I was quite shocked and surprised to see just how violently some viewers had reacted to the film; citing everything from the liberal approach of the film's script, the central performance from Nicole Kidman, and the fundamental message that seems implied by the film's very tender sense of emotional drama as reasons why this film was worthless or simply not good. This surprised me for two reasons, firstly; that these intelligent and well-versed viewers were unable to separate the elements of fact surrounding the real life Diane Arbus and her extraordinary body of work from the quite clearly fabricated depiction of grotesque beauty that the filmmakers create through the imagined relationship between our caricature of Diane and a character named Lionel; a mysterious former carnival performer. Secondly, it surprised me that these viewers felt that Arbus's life would be better served by a routine, by the books Hollywood biopic in which all the facts and back stories are simplified, and we end up with a very simple film about the triumph of the little guy against all odds.

Do people really want bland, cookie-cutter, connect the dots cinema; a struggle over adversary and all the usual nonsense that comes with those A-Z, biographical features, such as Walk the Line (2005) and Ray (2004)? Sadly, it would appear so. What happened to audiences craving imaginative, free-thinking cinema? Something that attempts to deconstruct a greater truth in an intelligent, imaginative and emotionally captivating way that is genuinely suited to the visual, metaphorical capabilities that cinema presents. For me, everything you would need to know about Arbus is here and everything you would need to know about her art is divulged in a number of interesting, highly imaginative visual quirks. You just have to scratch beneath the surface. Read between the lines and you'll see with this film the very psychological impulse and motivation to create something beautiful from the seemingly mundane; to capture that all too fleeting moment and preserve it on film forever. Fur, for me, took us inside the psychological world of Arbus, with none of the black and white moralising or textbook type tedium that often plagues this particular genre; but instead, showing us some of the potential ideas and imagined situations that came to instill her work with such a grotesque sense of beauty.

It has a long been said; "every picture tells a story". That's what this film is about. Anyone can read a book about the real life Arbus; but how on earth is that enriching the cinematic medium? I personally don't look to cinema to find something that is readily available to me at my local library. This film takes us inside Arbus' world and gives us a beautifully told and imaginative back-story that blends elements of real-life fact with references to Gothic literature, fairy stories, history and the subjective power of the art itself. The creative spirit of this film is exactly in tune with Arbus's creative vision. To give us something like the Rocky (1976) of photographer-themed biographical pictures would, to my mind at least, have been a much greater insult to the unique and continually captivating universe that this particular artist created through her work. You may disagree with the approach, or fail to see the appeal of the story, but for me, Fur is the kind of film that I feel I could go back to again and again and still find a number of things worth raving about.

Like one of Arbus's iconic pictures, Fur presents us with something seemingly drab, seemingly bizarre, and allows us to take the time to see the inherent beauty behind it. Like the work of Diane Arbus itself, you can choose to see it as something unfeeling or exploitative, or alternatively, you can see it as a gateway into understanding the enormous amount of empathy that Arbus had for her bizarre and often extraordinary subjects. The direction manages to create a mood and an ambiance that is halfway between the aforementioned William S. Burroughs and the antiseptic 50's Americana of The Bell Jar, with the otherworldly danger and mystique of a film like Pan's Labyrinth (2006). Alongside these stylistic elements we also have continual references to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the notion of Beauty and the Beast, and all tied together by the fine performances from Kidman as the shackled, stifled Arbus and Robert Downey Jr. as the mysterious and sympathetic Lionel.