Fridae

What's up with Nicole Kidman? She's been making one flop after the other. Let's list them: The Human Stain, The Stepford Wives, Bewitched, Birth, Dogville. She might as well dispense with titles and call her next films Flop VI, Flop VII, Flop VIII, Flop IX....Her sole hit in recent times was the cartoon Happy Feet, for which we only hear her voice. Now her career seems to have nosedived to its lowest point. Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus has been voted by several year-end publications as one of the worst films of 2006.

Diane Arbus, if you don't know, was American photographer in the 1970s. She became famous for casting a sympathetic eye on the misfits of society. She took beautiful snapshots of dwarfs, albinos, nudists, giants and Siamese twins, and hung them on the walls of chi-chi art galleries. Her fans called her a genius, but her critics call her an opportunistic voyeur.

This film imagines an affair Diane Arbus (Nicole Kidman) supposedly had with her upstairs neighbour (Robert Downey Jr), an extremely hairy "circus freak" who first taught her to see beauty in what's supposedly ugly and detestable. Though this film has noble intentions, it indulges in so many storytelling liberties that it quick tips over in the realm of the bizarre, the ridiculous and the laughable. Cineastes, like Diane Arbus, might see beauty in all this strangeness. The rest of us just don't get it.