There's a scene in "Fur" where photographer Diane Arbus, played by Nicole Kidman, is having sex with her husband, Alan (Ty Burrell), during a turbulent period in their marriage. His frustrations come to the fore, and he slams her head into the sofa, forcefully pinning her as he takes her from behind. She gets into it, and he asks, "What feels good about it?" Her: "It scares me."
It's this impulse — the thrill of dangerous sex, the attraction of going a bit too far — that fueled director Stephen Shainberg's last film, 2002's "Secretary," and he aims for a similar charge here. His film is not a straight-up bio-pic of Diane Arbus — the Manhattan-based photographer of the 1950s and '60s known for her portraits of "freaks" — but rather a magic-realist imagining of what drove Arbus in her art. Arbus photographed hermaphrodites, prostitutes, drag queens, giants, carnival folk — and the film imagines her discovering this world as a kind of modern fairy tale, a Manhattan art-world take on "Beauty and the Beast."
"Fur" introduces us to Arbus circa 1958, before she had become a photo- grapher. The film posits her as a person dominated by others, whether that's her loving husband, Alan, who uses her as his assistant in his photo studio, or her parents, who criticize and find fault, or her children, needy little beings demanding her attention. As in all post- feminist films — and this is definitely one — our heroine must reject the needs of others in order to discover her true self.