On Wednesday, November 27, 2002, at 12:17 AM, Marta Russell wrote:
>>
>> Peter:
>> Anyone see Frida yet? I tried but something came up.
>
> 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.
>
well, i can tell you right now that there's no polio. i'm what you might call a minor fan of frida's. there are a number of frustrating omissions and elisions in the film. her political activity, for example, is telescoped into a single scene of a protest march. and she comes off as even less well known than she actually was. i was waiting especially for the episode where she and concha michel plot diego's murder with a frozen leg of lamb, but concha is nowhere to be found (unless it's in the woman singer who pops up several times in the film). lupe seems to stand in for that sorority-of-sorts that developed among diego's paramours. it seems more about frida and diego than about her in some more basic or some bigger sense. perhaps it should have been called "frida and diego" (a la "henry and june"), but, well, it wasn't. blame book tie-ins.
otoh, i thought a lot of the magic realist stylizations in the film worked and worked well.
i had a hard time deciding what i thought of it. probably better films could have been (and hopefully will be) made about frida. but i'm not sure this is an awful one, when taken on its own terms.
j