Frida (2002) -- reviewed by J. Hoberman

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Tue Nov 26 22:57:07 PST 2002


At 10:17 PM -0800 11/26/02, Marta Russell wrote:
>I'm going soon. Already my crip friends are saying that the film
>overlooks the fact that she had polio as a child and was impaired
>before the railroad accident that damaged her spine. Being a long
>time fan of hers I will go see for myself whether the filmmaker is
>so ignorant as to not include that as a BIG part of who she was.


>From reviews, it seems that neither her disability nor her politics
is a big part of Julie Taymor's _Frida_.

***** by J. Hoberman October 23 - 29, 2002

She's been dead for nearly half a century, but Mexican painter Frida Kahlo is the quintessential artist of our moment. Kahlo was female, Latina, disabled, bisexual, Communist, and even part Jewish. She hobnobbed with world-historical figures from Nelson Rockefeller to Leon Trotsky, yet during her lifetime was largely unrecognized outside her circle. Best of all, her overriding subject was . . . herself. Since Hayden Herrera's biography propelled this hitherto marginal figure toward single-name celebrity, the artist herself has become an icon -- the face that launched a hundred thousand refrigerator magnets.

Herrera opened a 1983 Artforum article on Kahlo by introducing the artist as the star of a unique melodrama, citing the 35 surgical operations Kahlo endured from age 18 -- when her torso was crushed and impaled in a trolley accident -- until her death at 47. She next describes the Mexican folk costumes Kahlo wore, in part to conceal her injuries and in part to define her image. The subject of some 200 self-portraits, Kahlo played Gauguin to her own Tahiti and became her own trademark. Her concern with self-presentation and frank use of her physical condition anticipate later practitioners of performance and body art. Indeed, watching Salma Hayek impersonate Kahlo in Julie Taymor's Frida, it's difficult not to ponder the ironies inherent in the star's frisky perf and voluptuous bod.

Hayek, who also co-produced, inhabits Frida with the unconcealed triumph of one who has successfully wrested the role away from such formidable wannabes as Madonna and J.Lo. An earlier Kahlo biopic fell apart 10 years ago when angry Latina actresses protested the casting of Laura San Giacomo in the title role. But no one can fault Hayek's ethnicity or mistake her exuberant self-stereotyping. Mischievous schoolgirl or imperious invalid, Hayek is a tempestuous spitfire -- eyes aflash, lip curled, bodice swelling. Whatever the real Frida might have been, this one, as the former editor of The New Yorker used to say, is hot hot hot.

While husband-to-be Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina) argues politics with rival muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros (Antonio Banderas), Frida dances a mad provocative tango with comrade art-world babe, photographer Tina Modotti (Ashley Judd). Frida is a woman to whom nothing is foreign. She can hurl dishes at Diego (a big, good-natured slob who brushes off his infidelities with lines like "It was just a fuck -- I've given more affection in a handshake"), march at the head of the May Day demonstration, party down with the workers in a raunchy mariachi bar, accept the praise of suave surrealist André Breton ("Your paintings express what everyone feels -- that they are alone and in pain"), or tenderly give herself to smitten Leon Trotsky (Geoffrey Rush), brightening his exile and last year on earth.

Paul Leduc's no less hagiographic Frida, made in Mexico in 1984, presented Kahlo's life as a series of achronological episodes. The result was static and overly curatorial, but the impressionist model might have served Taymor better than her Frida's straightforward script, which is ultimately overwhelmed with incident and suggests the labor of many hands. "I paint what I see -- the world outside. You, you paint from in here," Diego tells Frida, grandly thumping his chest, and Taymor herself seems to have taken that observation to heart. Frida's strongest scenes -- including the catastrophic streetcar accident in which Kahlo is splayed out, bloody, and (as actually happened) covered with gold dust -- are boldly stylized and halfway to cartoon animation. There's even a tasty bit of business, apparently designed by the uncredited Brothers Quay, in which the delirious girl is ministered by a gaggle of Day of the Dead skeletons. The movie's palette is vibrant, and the numerous meals served throughout are delectable enough to upstage the star.

Frida bogs down in close-ups and plot explication, but hopeful Taymor never stops swatting the piñata of Kahlo's subjectivity. Improving upon her turgid adaptation of Titus, the director has no fear of gaudy trinkets. Would that there were more. Kahlo's paintings are regularly brought to life to take their place in the grand gallery of MTV surrealism. The pet monkeys that scamper through the heroine's tropical garden are reprised when she accompanies Diego to New York and in an elaborate hallucination imagines him as her King Kong. Swank and splashy as it is, Frida leaves the lurking suspicion that Taymor might have preferred to stage her pageant as a puppet show.

<http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0243/hoberman.php> ***** -- Yoshie

* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/>



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