Featuring Frida: a long-anticipated film about Frida Kahlo vividly portrays the tumultuous life of the posthumously acclaimed Mexican painter - Film - Movie Review

Art in America, Dec, 2002 by Katie Clifford

Frida, a new film about the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo that opened Nov. 1, offers a vivid portrayal of how the artist's turbulent life shaped her autobiographical work. Directed by Julie Taymor, who garnered attention for her Broadway version of The Lion King and the movie Titus, and based on Hayden Herrera's 1983 book Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, the movie sensitively draws from Herrera's work while adding surrealistic flourishes that honor the spirit of Kahlo's art.

Mexican-born Salma Hayek, also one of the film's producers, plays a convincing Kahlo who endures misfortune with a feisty poise. British actor Alfred Molina turns in a robust performance as the painter Diego Rivera, a notorious womanizer who, at age 43, took the 22-year-old Kahlo as his third wife. With an accompanying celebrity cast that includes Antonio Banderas as David Alfaro Siqueiros, Edward Norton as Nelson Rockefeller, and Geoffrey Rush as Leon Trotsky (with whom Kahlo had an affair), Frida ambitiously aims to appeal to audiences broader than art-house devotees and Kahlo fans.

The film arrives at the peak of "Fridamania." In the past decade, Kahlo's self-portraits have been widely reproduced, appearing on posters, T-shirts and even a U.S. postage stamp. Her paintings are increasingly featured in museum exhibitions and have fetched record auction prices; her life has been variously construed in books, operas, plays and documentaries; and her story has attracted pop entertainers Jennifer Lopez and Madonna (also a collector of Kahlo's art), who sought to play the artist in other film projects that never got off the ground.

While she now enjoys posthumous celebrity, Kahlo (1907-1954) received only moderate recognition during her lifetime, her work eclipsed by her far more famous husband's. But beginning with feminist reconsiderations of the canon in the 19708, and more definitively with the publication of Herrera's exhaustively researched biography, Kahlo reemerged as a cause to be championed and was newly lauded for her outsider credentials: not only was she a self-taught artist and a woman, she was bisexual, a Communist and a cripple (plagued by lifelong complications from both childhood polio and a near fatal bus accident at age 18). Enduring episodes of deteriorating health and the escapades of her philandering husband, Kahlo transformed her pain into art.

Shot on location in Mexico, Frida gives life to the legend, presenting a beautiful and embattled Kahlo as tragic heroine. The two-hour-long film unfolds as a love story, often picturing Kahlo as the neglected wife who nevertheless adores Rivera. Although Kahlo also pursued extramarital affairs, hers are minimized in the film, while Rivera's are posed as egregious infidelities that drive Kahlo to drink, depression and some inspired art-making. The marriage seriously founders after Rivera's fling with Kahlo's younger sister, Cristina. However, through divorce and remarriage their passion endured, the film reassures us, with the couple commemorating their 25th anniversary shortly before Kahlo's death in 1954 at age 47.

In the movie, we see Kahlo's development as an artist, beginning with her convalescence from the bus accident. While she is confined to bed in a body cast, her parents supply her with a lap easel and a mirror that is installed on the canopy above her so she can see herself paint. To the biographical information, Taymor adds elements of fantasy: throughout the film, several paintings are shown as literally coming to life. In one scene, for example, Hayek and Molina pose in a tableau that mimics the wedding portrait, Frida and Diego Rivera (1931). After holding still for a few moments, the figures then break into action, joining their wedding guests. It's a compelling illusion, vividly suggesting how thoroughly Kahlo's art and life were intertwined.

At times, the striking tableaux and gorgeous costumes seem to take precedence over a fully fleshed-out lead character; we repeatedly watch Kahlo in distress, the tears are plentiful, yet we don't necessarily feel her pain. Perhaps it's because the movie focuses on the artist as a victim of circumstance rather than portraying her as an individual with agency. Certainly Kahlo did suffer, but she also made choices to match her ambitions. Her paintings, for example, were not just created out of anguish, as the film erroneously suggests. They were also shaped by her sophisticated understanding of and active engagement with the art and politics of her day.

Both Kahlo and Rivera subscribed to Mexicanidad, the nationalist movement that aimed to purge Mexico of its European vestiges and rebuild its modern identity on the foundations of its indigenous cultures and ancient history. In the film, we see Rivera denounce European-influenced easel painting and abstraction in favor of figurative painting and large-scale public murals that champion socialist ideals (despite the fact that they were sometimes commissioned by high-profile capitalist clients, like the Rockefellers). Kahlo's position was more complex: she not only used her art to stress her allegiance to a new nationalist spirit, she crafted a persona that embodied this newly self-conscious Mexicanness. Kahlo was a mestizo (her mother was indigenous; her father, a Hungarian Jew who migrated from Germany). In her paintings, she emphasized her Indian heritage, borrowing from ancient Mexican and popular art forms, such as retablos, or votive paintings. She also deliberately maintained a naive realism in spite of the modernist trends with which she was familiar. In her daily dress, Kahlo adopted peasant-style long skirts and embroidered blouses, and adorned herself with pre-Columbian beaded necklaces and braided hairstyles.