Controversial but moving portrait of legendary artist
The densely embroidered documentary “Frida” pulls from many sources: home movies, archival footage, photographs, letters, its subject’s intimate diary, and reminiscence from friends and lovers of Frida Kahlo, Mexican artist and, later, global museum gift shop merchandise titan.
The film deserves your time, if only to find out where you stand on its primary point of debate. Working with animation creative director
Sofía Inés Cázares Lira, first-time feature director Carla Gutiérrez elects to animate, selectively, the famous Kahlo paintings, not as fully animated expansions but by lending movement and fluidity to details within those paintings. “Frida” also manipulates archival black-and-white footage here and there. In the context of describing a memory, tragic event or love affair, a portion of the filmed footage gets a strategic splash of color.
Chronologically, “Frida” begins in 1910, three years after her birth in Mexico City. Her defining, though not creatively limiting, catastrophe came at age 18: the trolley crash that sent a metal rod through Kahlo’s midsection, shattering her pelvis and causing lifelong anguish. Firsthand accounts of the accident, heard in voice-over, remain vividly awful. Frida “screamed so loud,” her art student friend remembers, “you couldn’t hear the ambulance’s siren.”
Fernanda Echevarría del Rivero gives voice to Kahlo throughout. To the film’s credit, we come to know a lot about Kahlo’s
spiritual, sexual and artistic energies, far-flung and ever-seeking, and never just in tragedy mode.
Marrying — twice — celebrated muralist Diego Rivera, Kahlo learned to navigate his ego, society’s gender biases and her imaginative vision of how her life could will her canvases into being, with a beating, loving heart. Life with Rivera defied peace or stability. Her painting “Memory, the Heart” found Kahlo exploring the emotional isolation she endured in between their two marriages.
Her miscarriage left her disconsolate, and also led to the work “Henry Ford Hospital.”
On the couple’s muchanticipated 1931 New York visit, Rivera’s inaugural U.S. exhibition, a huge success, took place at the Museum of Modern Art. Kahlo’s initial excitement soon gave way to a poor opinion of the moneyed American gawker class. “Frida” captures the media stardom, while keeping in mind that they were ordinary humans undergoing extraordinary things. Kahlo loved cutting through pretense. “A bunch of idiots who get excited over the dumbest things,” she wrote in her
diary of the Manhattan swells, in love with their formal wear. “I want to run and run until I get to Mexico.”
What “Frida” does, it does well. It also does too much, crowding its subject with expressive add-ons. The animation, the actors’ readings of diary entries and related correspondence, the archival footage manipulation, the lively but insistent use of music: That’s a full plate.
But to reiterate: It’s worth seeing.
Director Gutiérrez trained as an editor, working on the Julie Cohen and Betsy West-directed documentaries “RBG” (on Ruth Bader Ginsburg) and “Julia” (Child, that is), both deftly cut and nicely paced. The same goes for “Frida,” which, despite its busyness, sincerely embraces Kahlo the woman, as well as Kahlo the legend in the making. In her own time and her own words, she endured and painted “with the sole conviction to give myself pleasure, and the power to make a living with my trade.”
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