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November 01, 2006

Fur: An Imaginary Portrait Of Diane Arbus

What Steven Shainberg has set out to do with Fur: An Imaginary Portrait Of Diane Arbus is free the biopic from the shackles of literal history. Within the limits of that end, the film is an unqualified success. Beyond the confines of grand intentions, one runs into some problems - but nonetheless, I've done enough damning of the traditional biopic (no need to name names) that I can't help but embrace this picture.

Serious devotees of Diane Arbus may mistake this for a revisionist piece of history. It isn't. Shainberg alights so quickly from biographical detail (beginning with the casting of the statuesque Nicole Kidman) that it's almost impossible to read the film as anything other than fantasy, and equally difficult to keep in mind its basis in fact. This will leave those audience members unfamiliar with Arbus somewhat in the dark as to the import of this enigmatic woman on the screen; indeed, none of Arbus' work is featured in the film, and those expecting to learn something about one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century will leave the theater as much in the dark about the art as the artist.

Thus, I think there are very particular and rather precarious criteria necessary for appreciating Fur to the fullest extent. One must be aware of Arbus' photography and, to a certain extent, her life and death, and keep her and her work in mind throughout the film - but not to the extent that the extensive fiction of Shainberg's script becomes distracting or insulting. Forget the real woman and the film suddenly becomes pointless; recall her too vividly and it is conversely diminished.

The key words with which to approach the film are in its title; that it is an imaginary portrait is not just an excuse to play fast and loose with the facts, but a reminder to take nothing in the film at face value. Indeed, what is there on the surface isn't terribly satisfying; literally reading the film as an assumption of the events that lead Arbus to pick up a camera confines the film to - for all its excessive weirdness - a rather typical story of self discovery, a romance that is equal parts Beauty And The Beast and Shainberg's own Secretary. As a series of events, the film suffers.

But even though the film has an ostensible timeline, complete with title cards reading 'Three Years Earlier' and 'Two Years Later' and such, I really don't believe that Shainberg and screenwriter Erin Crissidia Wilson intended the film to be constricted to any sort of chronology. The gateway metaphor seems clear: Diane, the daughter of wealthy furriers, begins her road to artistic self discovery when she meets Lionel (Robert Downey, Jr.) a former circus-freak who is covered head to toe in fur. Lionel can be interpreted as a real character, but doing so would trap the film within its own baroque design. Better to read him as a manifestation of something deep and dark within Diane herself; this frees the film from its otherwise awkward temporality and spacial geography. Lionel's apartment (like James Spader's distracting office in Secretary) is so cavernous and baroque that it's almost impossible to suspend disbelief, until one begins to notice that the ornate grecian tanks in which he dyes the wigs made of his mane resemble the tubs of developer and fixer commonly found in the darkroom.

It's a delicate substructure of imagery and incident, punctuated by latent shots of Diane's Rolleiflex camera, which goes unused for most of the film. Arbus didn't actually begin using a Rolleiflex until later in her career (and indeed, it became intrinsic to her acclaimed style), but its prominence in the film further speaks to Shainberg's intentions. Additionally, it is one of the two overt tethers he provides to the real woman from whom this fanciful creation of his has sprung. The other is the marginalized folk who will eventually become Arbus' subjects; the sideshow freaks and societal outcasts who, in the film, she meets through Lionel. As obvious a symbol as Lionel's hirsute body is the image of dwarves and giants and dominatrixes parading down from the trapdoor in the floor of the upstairs loft, through Diane's ceiling, into the relatively objective world of her family's apartment.

This, technically speaking, could be seen as reality; this apartment, her husband, her children, her obstreperous socialite family (whose airs inevitably and unfortunately invites comparisons to Birth). But the Diane who coexists with them belongs entirely to the world upstairs and to the abstract process that, perhaps moreso than the woman herself, the film is a portrait of. Shainberg has pinpointed a miniscule black hole in Arbus' biography and exploded it into this flight of emotional fancy. He has, essentially, given narrative form to what is commonly referred to as 'the creative spark.' In that sense, the same film could have been made about any artist, or any member of the audience, which is exactly what most biopics don't do; they stick so strictly to the life of their subjects that they become stolidly exclusive. In this case, Arbus and the details of her life are the vehicle for an idea, rather than a portrait unto themselves. It isn't entirely successful, and a convincing argument could be raised that it isn't successful at all; but if I were given a choice between this film and one in which all the facts were laid out before me alongside her famous photographs, the choice would be simple: I'd rather not know.

* * *

The filmmakers were denied permission by Arbus' estate to use her photography, which reminded me of another biographical portrait with a similar title from a number of years ago: John Maybury's Love Is The Devil: Study For A Portrait Of Francis Bacon, starring Derek Jacobi as the artist and Daniel Craig as his lover/inspiration. Maybury was refused the right to use any the actual painting, and so instead turned the visual style of the film itself into an impressionistic reflection of Bacon's art. I haven't seen the film since it opened back in 1998, but I remember really loving it. Has anyone else seen it? I think it deserves to be revisited.

* * *

I haven't written anything about Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, other than to mention that I saw and loved it, because I don't know that I have anything original to say about it. I thought the fusion of accents and music (and Converse shoes) resulted in a more believable period piece than pretty much anything short of The New World. What Coppola nailed, and what made all the difference in the world, was the emotional accuracy. She refused to let historical context take precedence over character. I'm fairly certain plenty of other critics have, by this point, written similar sentiments, probably using many of the same words and phrasing, and so I'll leave my opinion at that, with, as a postscript, a note of amazement that I never once thought of the film as biopic. I suppose another trope of the genre is that they take place in the past; Coppola's film, despite its setting, occurs vividly in the present.

Posted by David Lowery at November 1, 2006 04:59 PM

Comments

Posted by: Maya at November 3, 2006 05:36 PM

Posted by: Ghostboy at November 4, 2006 12:59 AM