Subtitled AN IMAGINARY PORTRAIT OF DIANE ARBUS, we could say thank God for telling us on the first hand this is just imaginary and fabricated. Most biographies are not really a hundred-percent factual anyway, and in some ways just made up to fit the cinematic demands of the film. Take a bit of your life, put some drama, mystery, a little bit of crying and shouting and suicidal-tendency attitudes, it’s the perfect biography meant for the screen. Meanwhile, as FUR is embellished with hyperactive imagination, telling us what Diane Arbus’ life should have been, the result is as eccentric as its main character, engaging at certain points but fluttery and unstable in some.


For anyone who doesn’t know about Diane Arbus (pronounced as Dee-ann), she’s a famous American photographer of the 50s who revolutionised photography and influenced many due to her unusual empathy towards the marginalised people in the society i.e. transvestites, deformed individuals, dwarfism, and all that lot. In this film, Steven Shainberg has certainly put a different flavour to explain Arbus’ reason to her being, a complex story about love, sexual and artistic awakenings, and of course, fur and hair.


Diane Arbus (Nicole Kidman), an assistant (also a designer and make-up artist) to her husband, a famous mainstream photographer in New York, falls in love with a rather hairy neighbour upstairs (played by Robert Downey Jr.). She’s a wife who wanted to spread her wings and be freed from conventional entrapments of her life, which sees beauty behind even the ugliest things and has an obsession with imperfection. When she sees Lionel, her masked neighbour concealing a gargantuan amount of hair beneath, her life started to change. She starts picking up her old batty camera and begins into a journey of her artistic fiefdom.


What I like in this film is mainly the direction. The camera indeed shows us that there could be beauty even in the minutest things. Shainberg directs with grace, with careful camera movements, splashing his sets with intense colour and meanings. Like his last film, SECETARY, he focuses his head on character developments and gives importance to dialogues. The performances are astounding as well; Nicole Kidman is pitch-perfect as Diane, as one could feel her subtlety yet weird sadomasochistic resolve, her craving of changing her life and her intention towards her freakish photographs. Robert Downey Jr. is a tad disturbing as well, when he shows his most appreciable acting using his eyes (as he’s all covered in fur).


But FUR never soars. The problem relies heavily on its subject matter. With much reference to BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, ALICE IN THE WONDERLAND and THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, the story is a bit lost in the wilderness, probably due to the whole fabrication thing and not really giving the message of why Arbus had essentially made her freakish photographs into magnificent wonders. Kidman may have conveyed Arbus’ inner weirdness, but there’s just so many hair in this film to tangle with. Even at the end of the film, it would make you feel left-out of what really Arbus intends us to understand. But this is a good film, it’s just understated.




RATING: B-