All for the love of Frida

Frida: Viva La Vida (E, 97 mins) Directed by Giovanni Troilo Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★★

‘I’ve been thinking a lot about the way our future affects our past,’’ said a friend. And now I’m thinking about that line, too. And wondering if maybe the life and post-life of Frida Kahlo is a perfect example of what my friend maybe meant.

Kahlo was born in 1907, in the Coyoacan – ‘‘the place of coyotes’’ – municipality of Mexico City. She was a promising student, one of four daughters, with an ambition to study medicine and be a doctor.

She endured polio as a child, but a bus crash when she was 18 changed her life’s trajectory forever. A metal handrail impaled Kahlo through her abdomen, breaking her pelvis and ruining her lower back.

Confined to bed for months, Kahlo learned to paint by studying her own reflection in a mirror suspended above her. Those early canvases are now regarded as early masterpieces of near-surrealism.

She was courted by Diego Rivera – then the greatest muralist and one of the most famous artists in Mexico – and married him in 1929. Rivera was a huge man, while Kahlo was small and fragile. They became known to the public and press as ‘‘the elephant and the dove’’.

Against a tragic and tumultuous backdrop of miscarriages, affairs (hers and his), separations and reconciliations, Kahlo continued to work, producing paintings that deployed mythological and religious references, great wit, lacerating insight and Kahlo’s deep respect and understanding for Mexico’s history and people.

When she died in 1954, at the age of 47, Kahlo was a respected and successful artist, the first Mexican to have work bought by the Louvre. But nothing of her reputation during her life really hinted at the acclaim that would follow.

Kahlo’s work and – especially – her life-story were re-evaluated in the 1970s and 80s.

Her unrelenting work in the face of pain and cruelty were a revelation and an inspiration to a generation of women around the world – and also to the renaissance of Mexican nationalism.

Kahlo became the perfect screen on which to project any human aspiration to get out from under oppression.

The fact that she was also a wonderful painter, whose modernist ideas were underappreciated in her lifetime, completed a perfect storm of posthumous deification.

Frida: Viva La Vida is the story of all this and more. Director Giovanni Troilo and his narrator Asia Argento bring a superficial ‘‘there were two Fridas’’ trope early.

Too often Kahlo the woman gets lost beneath the mythologising and a tired recounting of the more sensational moments in her heroically varied sex life.

But Kahlo triumphs, as the sheer volume and power of her symbolic presence in the world of today alters, but somehow elevates, the facts of her life.

Go see Frida: Viva La Vida. There is a lot not to love about it, but you would be a fool to not love the life.