In a time of bold divisions between good girls and bad, Ms. Page colored outside the lines.

So does the Canadian-born, Oxford-educated Ms. Harron, whose visually adventurous new film drew praise on the festival circuit and some sharp complaints for not probing its subject's psyche more deeply. Speaking recently from the Brooklyn home she shares with the filmmaker John Walsh and their two daughters, she talked about why "The Notorious Bettie Page" bypasses the usual tell-all tropes of a conventional biopic to show a woman who, domesticating lust as effectively as Hugh Hefner ever did, became a magnet for a decade's thrilled, guilty, convoluted attitudes toward sex.