DIRECTOR
Julie Taymor
SCREENWRITERS
Clancy
Sigal
Diane Lake
Gregory Nava
Anna Thomas
based
on the book Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo by
Hayden
Herrera
PRODUCERS
Lindsay Flickinger
Sarah Green
Nancy Hardin
Salma Hayek
Jay Polstein
Roberto Sneider
Lizz Speed
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Rodrigo Prieto
MUSIC
Elliot Goldenthal
EDITOR
Françoise Bonnot
CAST
Salma Hayek (Frida Kahlo)
Alfred Molina (Diego Rivera)
Geoffrey Rush (Leon Trotsky)
Ashley Judd (Tina Modotti)
Antonio Banderas (David Alfaro Siqueiros)
Edward Norton (Nelson Rockefeller)
Valeria Golino (Lupe Marín)
Mía Maestro (Cristina Kahlo)
Roger Rees (Guillermo Kahlo)
Patricia Reyes Spíndola (Matilde Kahlo)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 118m
U.S. release: November 8, 2002
Video availability: TBA
Official
website
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It may have pleased Frida Kahlo
to know that the first I ever heard of her was in a comic book.
Not just any comic book, mind you, but the acclaimed Love
and Rockets, helmed by the Mexican-American brothers Gilbert
and Jaime Hernandez. Gilbert has always been the more surrealist
of the two, so it was natural for him to turn his pen in 1988
to a twelve-page biography of Frida's life. (The curious can
find his piece "Frida" in the Love and Rockets
collection Flies on the Ceiling.) Hernandez' work expressed
Frida through his own eyes while borrowing a bit from the source
-- it was a case of one artist reaching out to another. The same
is true of Julie Taymor's film Frida, which like Hernandez'
piece was based on the Hayden Herrera biography. Taymor's background
is in theater -- specifically, highly stylized theater of the
sort that made her vision of The Lion King a Broadway
must-see. Her 1999 debut film Titus was a whirlwind of
imagery built around the cycle of violence. Frida finds
Taymor much more subdued; there aren't nearly as many flights
of fancy. Still, the film is as dynamic and passionate as its
subject.
Salma Hayek fought tooth and
nail for this project (Jennifer Lopez had a rival biopic going
at one point), and this petite actress, who had always struck
me as an entertaining light presence but not much more, takes
the screen and holds it with a playful animal fierceness that
would do -- and does do -- the real Frida proud. Hayek's Frida
is a young woman who falls in with the artistic crowd at school,
and embraces new and exciting ideas about shattering the complacency
of the bourgeois. Within her is art waiting to be freed by pain.
The pain comes soon enough, in a trolley accident that leaves
her immobile for months, during which she doodles butterflies
on her body cast until her parents bring her some real canvasses
to unload on. The script keeps reminding us that Frida is in
chronic pain, though Hayek and Taymor avoid showing us the obligatory
scenes of Frida wincing. We look at her paintings and we get
it.
Frida packed a lot of living
and loving into one 47-year life, and Taymor and her four screenwriters
(five if you include Edward Norton, who appears here as Nelson
Rockefeller and is said to have given the script an uncredited
polish) can't possibly include it all. As it is, we see Frida
dancing with photographer Tina Modotti (Ashley Judd), trysting
with the likes of Leon Trotsky (Geoffrey Rush) and Josephine
Baker (not named as such here, but, as Hayek has said, "There
is evidence that they, uh, knew each other"), and, most
centrally, spending a great deal of time loving/hating her ultimate
match, the womanizing artist Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina). Played
by Molina with what can only be called flabby sensuality -- he
thinks he's irresistible, therefore he is -- Diego tells Frida
up front that he can't be faithful to one woman; Frida responds
that what's really important to her is loyalty. Screw
whoever you want, she essentially says, but love me and come
home to me. It's a dynamic familiar from the great documentary
Crumb,
in which Aline Kominsky-Crumb shrugged at the idea that her husband
Robert has affairs, because she has them, too. These movies seem
to say that artists who exist outside conventional sexual mores
nevertheless need a supportive partner attuned to their art,
as well as one who is also an artist.
The movie hurtles along; the
style couldn't be more different from the forbidding tableaux
of Taymor's Titus. Taymor knows she has tons of Frida
art to draw from, though, and the movie at its most cinematic
is a sort of homage to Mexican art in general -- its obsession
with skulls and death, its roots in folk art and infatuation
with cheap pop art raised to the level of romanticism, its lurid
aliveness. (One might think that Pedro Almodovar would
be the obvious choice for a Frida biopic, but he's been there
and done that in his own highly original work.) Taymor brings
in the Brothers Quay to animate a spooky delirium scene after
Frida's accident; she envisions Diego's arrival in New York,
where he was commissioned to paint a mural for Nelson Rockefeller
(as was also dramatized in Tim Robbins' Cradle
Will Rock), as King Kong terrorizing the city until the
offended bourgeoisie shoot him down. Taymor is an artist,
but she's also an entertainer, and Frida is by very conscious
design one of the most accessible art films (in all senses of
the word) in years.
As bold and fearless as its
heroine, Frida rescues the artist from the standard victimology-feminism
line that Diego kept Frida under his thumb and was a rotten husband.
(The movie concedes that Diego was a shitty husband, but
-- due to Taymor's and especially Molina's generosity of spirit
in portraying him -- he nonetheless comes off as a good, if flawed,
man.) This movie has no time for pity, just as Frida had no time
for self-pity. She dealt with her demons and her pain by pouring
them into her work; in the movie, this allows her the space to
live life to its fullest. Frida begins and climaxes with
a wonderfully cheesy Hollywood moment: Sickly and on the verge
of pneumonia, Frida is told by her doctor that she can't leave
her bed to attend the first exhibition of her work in Mexico;
her response is to have herself dressed fabulously and carried
to the exhibition in her bed. One could hardly find a
more over-the-top denouement outside a melodrama of the '50s.
Well, yeah, it's Hollywood and it's schmaltzy, but it's also
true -- Frida did actually do that. And in the very last
shot -- the best closing image I've seen this year -- Taymor
does justice to the legend of Frida's cremation: that the light
from her burning hair gave her the appearance of a smile. Like
Gilbert Hernandez before her, Taymor brings all of her artist's
compassion to bear on a subject that deserves it.
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