>>REVIEW
FUR: AN IMAGINARY PORTRAIT OF DIANE ARBUS
STARRING: Nicole Kidman and Robert Downey Jr.
DIRECTED BY: Steven Shainberg
Opens Friday, December 8
Uptown Screen
Diane Arbus photographs often inspire heated debate. Some view her work as exploitative and removed, while others claim she was a genius who could see and celebrate the beauty within all of us.
Filmmaker Steven Shainberg has taken the latter stance, working with writer Erin Cressida Wilson to create a reverent supposition of what may have spurred Arbus to relinquish a comfortable Park Avenue life to pursue a life on the murky fringe.
As a restless upper-crust wife, Arbus (Nicole Kidman) is close to strangulation from fear and boredom in the presence of her family. But when the mysterious stranger Lionel Sweeney (Robert Downey Jr.) takes up residence upstairs, she is instantly at ease with the former circus freak. Before long, she is spending more time in his odd company than with her own family.
Kidman is relentlessly beautiful, expertly conveying her frustration with the banality of housewifery and the secret lusts that both thrill and frighten her. Part voyeur, part exhibitionist, she struggles with her oddness and feels like a stranger to her own children.
Even though he's acting from behind a body coated with long hair, Downey Jr. conveys magnetism with his voice and soulful eyes. It's easy to see how anyone with an open mind could be lured into his world. It also proves sexual desire isn't always linked to physical attraction
As the hopelessly smitten husband, Alan Arbus (Ty Burrell) soon realizes his wife is slipping away into the hirsute arms of the neighbour and grows a beard in a feeble attempt to keep her affections, to no avail. Burrell's performance is understated but powerful and his baffled but sincere love for his wife is heart-wrenching.
There is a disclaimer at the beginning of this film stating this is not a factual biography of Arbus, but rather musings on what could have been the driving forces and events that inspired her to take such dark and probing photographs. The sound of a razor scraping against skin, the rustle of skirts and the ripple of water in a bath successfully coax the viewer into this tactile fantasy.
If we are to believe these musings, Arbus felt more at home with the outer fringe populated with freaks and geeks than the upper-crust inhabited by fur-draped debutantes. Fur is like a softly remembered dream, ripe with allegory and one which could explain the creative origins of a revered and mysterious visionary.
"A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know." Diane Arbus
>>PREVIEW
FUR: AN IMAGINARY PORTRAIT OF DIANE ARBUS
STARRING: Nicole Kidman and Robert Downey Jr.
DIRECTED BY: Steven Shainberg
Opens Friday, December 8
Uptown Screen
Diane Arbus had a profound impact on the world of photography and art as a whole. Her black-and-white images sliced through the usual icing of portraiture, often revealing a messy, jarring and unapologetic humanity.
She favoured subjects who existed outside society's mainstream, circus freaks and dishevelled children cavorting on the mean streets of her native New York City. After separating from her husband in 1969, she quickly carved out a career of her own and her work as a photojournalist appeared in Esquire and Harper's Bazaar.
In the movie Fur, she is portrayed as an engaged voyeur, someone who connected with her subjects prior to snapping them, often by revealing something of a personal nature. Images of Arbus seem to contradict that notion, depicting a pale, wary figure suspiciously eying the lens.
Her observations on photography have been widely quoted. For those who questioned her motives in glorifying society's castoffs, she had this to say, "Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats."
Her photograph "Identical Twins," taken in 1967, is considered to be the inspiration for the creepy twins in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and sold for $478,400 in 2004. It is ninth on the list of the world's most expensive photographs.
"She often used controversial subject matter, raising some big questions. What is private? What is public?" explains Mitch Kern, head of photography at Alberta College of Art and Design.
"She approached her photos in a personal, journalistic way. Our understanding of photos up until that point was that the camera doesn't lie," he says. "The shutter opens, then it closes. At that moment, the photographer can't affect the image." Kern says Arbus challenged that notion of photography by inflecting her opinion into her work.
"Seeing something with love or contempt can affect how the work is interpreted by an audience," he says. She also had the advantage of intimate access to her subjects that most men weren't able to attain at that point in history.
"As a woman, she was able to cross lines men couldn't. She was seen as non-threatening," he says, adding her choice of subjects often rattled the mainstream. "Her photos made people uncomfortable. They distressed people who viewed American life as utopian society."
Arbus committed suicide in 1971. |
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