Diane Arbus was an American photographer who preferred her people a little on the odd side. The image I am most familiar with is of a pair of twins with dark hair and dresses and strange smiles. She took pictures of giants and dwarfs and people that seemed a few bricks shy of a load. She had an unusual knack for finding people when they didn’t look their best. But that was the way she saw them at their best. Her pictures still captivate and repulse at the same time. There is an odd timelessness about these black and white studies. As if they could have been taken at any time or maybe out of time.
Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, stars Nicole Kidman and Robert Downy, Jr, who I mistook for Kevin Spacey due to his accent and his face being covered in fur. The acting is great all the way round. The sets are pretty and wonderfully contrasting to one another. It is a coming of age story for a grown woman who is invited into a world unknown to her. A world she enters, at first timidly, then eagerly.
There is something wonderful about the idea of finding a whole new world right next door, or in this case, right up the stairs. In our modern world where anything and everything is right at our fingertips, the idea that there can be much of anything that is shocking, is itself, shocking. But at the same time, our world is smaller. Retarded and handicapped are bad words. Freak means a hot woman, or at least it did last time I heard anyone use it.
There are still special people, we just are not supposed to notice that they are special anymore. Maybe that is part of what makes Arbus’s pictures so appealing. She lets us stare. She invites to stare. And we all like to stare.
This was a good movie, just be sure to look at some of Diane Arbus’s real work, too.
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