Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus

Just a week after Becoming Jane dismayed Jane Austen's more purist fans, here's another film that fantasises about a famous woman's artistic awakening, and they both approach female genius from the same angle. All a woman needs to unlock her creativity and escape her bourgeois background, apparently, is an indecent proposal from a far more liberated man.

In Fur, it's Diane Arbus who gets this patronising treatment. As played by a typically pale and watery-eyed Nicole Kidman, she's the very model of a 1950s helpmate: she raises two daughters, she works as an assistant in her husband's New York photography studio, and she looks immaculately pretty while she's doing both. But part of her yearns for a less buttoned-up existence, a longing which is conveyed via the unsubtle means of having Arbus sneaking out onto her balcony and unbuttoning her dress. Then, in 1958, she meets her new neighbour, Lionel, a Chewbacca-lookalike played by a very downy Robert Downey Jr. He agrees to let Arbus photograph him, but not until he's introduced her to his old colleagues from his days as a circus freak.

Arbus is renowned for the photos she took of these giants, dwarves and identical twins - not that you'd know it from Fur. Rather than opting for a conventional biopic, the writer and director of Secretary tell an almost entirely fictional story. Lionel the lion-man, for one, never existed. An opening caption informs us that we're watching "a tribute to Diane: a film that invents characters and situations that reach beyond reality to express what might have been Arbus's inner experience on her extraordinary path". Luckily, Fur itself isn't as horrendously written as that caption, although at times it's not far off. It's a self-consciously dreamy fairy-tale romance, overflowing with references to Beauty and the Beast and Alice in Wonderland, and because it's expressing Arbus's "inner experience", the production designer can be as fanciful as she likes. Within hours of moving in, Lionel has remodelled his flat as a Moorish palace with a bath the size of a swimming pool.

Kidman and Downey compete to see which of them can whisper more quietly, but their relationship is persuasively tender and erotic, just as long as you forget that it has anything to do with Arbus. Fur hangs onto a couple of true biographical details, but there's no inkling of her eventual suicide, it doesn't reproduce a single one of her photographs, and it doesn't attempt to replicate their ominous, Victorian style. It's a strange sort of tribute. At least in her imaginary portrait, the young Jane Austen got to do some writing.

n.barber@independent.co.uk