Review

Review Date: 10-November-02
Spoiler Rating: High
Juju Judgment: Juicy

Frida (2002)

Julie Taymor and Salma Hayek's "Frida" is a good example of art imitating life in more ways than one. It is not only a movie about Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, but is also a creative homage to female beauty, vitality, and power. As such, it is a visually pleasing and generally entertaining film, if not a terribly enlightening one. "Frida" is less the biography of an artist and more a tribute to a woman who lived an extremely full life, with profound experiences of love, pain, and self-expression.

The movie depicts Kahlo's life from the end of her school days in the early 1920s until her death in 1954. As embodied by Hayek, Frida is a vibrant, courageous woman remarkable more for the way she voraciously engaged in all the extraordinary experiences life offered her than for her artistic vision. Indeed, there is the suggestion early on that she might have taken quite a different, more conservative path were it not for two traumatic experiences suffered in her youth: first, a near fatal bus crash which severely damaged her body and would plague her for the rest of her life; second, abandonment by her first love, a nice, proper boy from school who leaves for Europe during her convalescence. Having learned harshly that life requires fortitude and hearts are made to be broken, Frida emerges from her sick bed a woman determined to make her way in the world on her own terms, and with her own definition of happiness.

To help her father with the hospital bills, Frida places herself under the tutelage of the famous (and famously randy) muralist Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina) to develop her budding artistic talent. Their relationship is the central concern of the film, as indeed their marriage (or rather marriages, since they wed for a second time after divorcing) appears to have been the central concern of Kahlo's life. For twenty-five years the Riveras challenged, loved, supported, and tortured each other, and for Frida this was the critical factor in her attempt to live by the dictates of her heart. Forced to accept Diego's infidelities and unable to have children, she uses the freedom of her unusual life to paint, learn, travel, and probe the depths of love (as well as explore her bisexuality). Molina has the hardest role in the film, playing an overweight boor who tramples on the feelings of the heroine but is nevertheless irresistible not only to her, but to every other woman as well. He doesn't quite bring across what made Rivera such a ladies' man, but his scenes with Hayek depict real affection, particularly in the telling instances when Frida's individuality lights him up with adoration (as when she arrives for their wedding in a splash of extemporaneous color). As an artist, it appears that Frida never quite got out of her husband's shadow, but the movie is not concerned with this. Instead, it highlights her approach to love and life, which was almost entirely defined by her relationship with Diego.

In addition to his artistic fame and experience, the movie shows how her husband's socialism also helped to define Frida, making her a part of remarkable situations that add to her glamour. She is there at rallies and marches and attends fabulous parties with notorious free-thinkers; most notably, she plays hostess to exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky (played by Geoffrey Rush) after he flees Stalin and takes refuge in Diego's home. In a juicy bit of tabloid-like indiscretion, Frida ends up bedding the married Trotsky, who sees in her the bravery and lust for life which is the only hope for a troubled world. By this point in the story we are not surprised by the affair, for the film's main point has been clearly made --- Frida had a spark of life which fed not only her own soul, but those around her as well.

Taymor, who is known as a visual stylist, enhances the feeling of passion and energy created by the dramatic events of the story with an intense lushness --- in costumes, in settings, in an occasional artistic or erotic tableau, and in Hayek's gorgeous face, hair, and body. The movie is so lush, in fact, as to detract from its realism; the lasting impression is not of what Frida Kahlo must have looked like, thought, or felt, but of the capacity for inspiration that such a woman might have exercised over herself and the world around her. When all is said and done, "Frida" does not shed much light on the mind of painter, but it does generate an appreciation of a brave, uncompromising femininity that drove one woman to make her mark on both canvas and the world at large.

Copyright © 2002 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.