Julie Taymor, “Frida” (2001)
A very pretty and colourful film on the life of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907 – 1954), “Frida” plays the artist’s life straight, concentrating on her personal life and loves from the time she was a teenager to the last weeks of her life. Although the film can be quirky in parts, having been directed by Julie Taymor, and makes good use of Kahlo’s paintings and other works to show audiences the connection between Kahlo’s emotions and feelings about events in her life and the art she produced, ultimately the whole shebang is very conservative and even dull towards the end as it drags towards the artist’s death. I guess in the current political climate, Taymor and actor Salma Hayek, who nursed an ambition to make a film about Kahlo’s life for a long time, have done what they could and played safe by narrowing the scope of the bio-pic to a straight retelling of Kahlo’s life and portraying Kahlo herself as an icon and role model for women.
The film starts in 1922 when as a school-kid Kahlo (Hayek) first meets Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina) who was at least 20 years older than she was and already famous as a painter of murals. A couple of years later Kahlo suffers the trolley-car accident that was to affect her health for the rest of her life and direct her life away from studying medicine and becoming a doctor and to painting. After painting for some time, Kahlo remembers Rivera and asks him to evaluate her paintings so that she can decide whether she should continue. Rivera gives her paintings and painting ability the thumbs-up and so begins a long and tortuous romance between Kahlo and Rivera and their involvement in socialist revolutionary politics. Although Rivera and Kahlo marry, Rivera continues to have affairs with other women and over time this causes a rift to develop between the two. To infuriate Rivera, Kahlo herself embarks on affairs including one with Parisian chanteuse Josephine Baker and one with one of Rivera’s girlfriends. The last straw comes when Kahlo discovers Rivera making out with Cristina her sister and she boots hims out of her life. Divorce quickly follows.
Along the way Rivera accepts a commission to paint a mural “Man at the Crossroads” for Nelson D Rockefeller (Edward Norton) at the Rockefeller Center and the couple go to New York City for the course of the commission. When Rockefeller discovers Rivera has included a portrait of Vladimir Lenin in the painting, he demands that Rivera remove it but the muralist refuses so the commission ends and the couple return to Mexico. In the film the mural is destroyed and nothing more is said about it although in fact years afterwards Rivera was able to recreate the mural in Mexico from photographs taken of the original work. By 1937, Rivera and Kahlo have separated but go through the motions of being a married couple to give shelter in Kahlo’s childhood home to Leon Trotsky and his wife who have fled Stalin to come to Mexico. Predictably Trotsky and Kahlo are embroiled in an affair that upsets Trotsky’s wife Natasha and so the Russian couple must leave Kahlo’s house. That’s about the extent of the politics in “Frida”.
Although it’s probably too much to expect a 2-hour film to be exact on all the details of Rivera and Kahlo’s life together, “Frida” skips out some very significant details such as the fact that Rivera was an atheist and often railed against the influence of the Roman Catholic Church in Mexican society and culture. Details about aspects of Kahlo’s life are often missing as well which lead to some lapses in the script and dialogue. The whole film is reduced to a sometimes unfunny and crude soap opera melodrama in which Kahlo and Rivera come off as a stereotyped cartoon couple who find they can’t live together while married but then find they can’t live separately after divorce.
After Kahlo’s death, I half-expected there might be a few titles stating that Rivera remarried after Kahlo’s death but died in 1957. It seems rather cruel that the film should have left this fact out – I’m sure the audience would have loved to know that after Kahlo’s death Rivera realised she’d been the best thing that ever happened to him – but this would have been inconsistent with the film’s intended portrayal of Kahlo as a contradictory creature who wanted to be independent and have a career yet wanted to be Rivera’s wife and to cook all his favourite meals and bear his children.
Where the film excels is in detailing Kahlo’s colourful character and eccentric fashion sense, and how her paintings were an extension of her emotional life, her pride in Mexican culture and life, and her private pain, both physical and psychological. The exuberance of Mexican culture is apparent although the portrayal can be stereotyped with an emphasis on the “exotic” aspects of the culture (such as the obsession with death and the Todos los Santos celebration in which families visit the graves of dead relatives and have parties with them). The Kahlo family home is a significant character in the film.
The actors do good work with what they are given and Hayek probably gives the performance of her life but overall the film isn’t remarkable and doesn’t do the figure of Kahlo much justice. The gender politics behind the making of the film ultimately pulls it down. One wonders why women like Julie Taymor, who already enjoy advantages that didn’t exist in Kahlo’s time, have to mould Kahlo to fit the template of independent career woman married to her art and philandering husband instead of just showing Kahlo as she was, warts and all. I’m sure Kahlo would have appreciated that.