‘Frida’ is the biography of the legendary Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Director Julie Taymor does well to portray Frida as a brilliant woman who lived her life more enthusiastically and tolerated more hardship and pain than should have been humanly possible. Frida Kahlo (Salma Hayek) proves that creativity is not a matter of luck but due to hard work and endurance.
The film’s theme is well supported by its plot, cinematography, characters and costumes.
The plot revolves around two prominent events in Frida’s life – the trolley car accident in 1929 (when she is 18) that breaks her back and dooms her to a life of excruciating pain, and her marriage (when she is 22) to Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina), a brilliant muralist but a notorious adulterer whose numerous extramarital affairs makes Frida’s life miserable. Frida keeps herself busy while trying to transfer her internal emotions and pain into her drawings and paintings. Her ongoing physical pain is exacerbated when she undergoes amputation of her right leg in 1953. She continues to fight against pain, telling the doctors to “just patch me up, so I can paint.” She keeps on painting right up to her death a year later.
Frida’s accident is shown as a slow motion sequence of a bluebird flying away and gold dust settling on her maimed body. In another scene, she has macabre hallucinations of ominous dance-of-death skeletons that magically change into her surgeons. The entire film has a dazzling visual style, literally throbbing with color: orange, green, blue, and yellow, that highlights the vigorous-intensity of her short, tumultuous life.
Salma Hayek is well supported by other characters such as teenage years’ boyfriend Alejandro ‘Alex’ (Diego Luna), her doting father Guillermo Kahlo (Roger Rees) and mother Patricia Reyes Spindola (Matilda Kahlo), Diego’s ex-wife Lupe Marin (Valeria Golino), muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros (Antonio Banderas) and photographer Tina Modotti (Ashley Judd). Alfred Molina is impressive as her philandering husband who even stoops to having sex with Frida’s sister Christina (Mia Maestra). Frida responds to his extramarital affairs by engaging in affairs – both heterosexual and lesbian – of her own, notably with Leon Trotsky (Geoffrey Rush) and Gracie (Saffron Burrows).
Costume designer Julie Weiss’ choices of bright fuchsia, dark red, and lime green colors make Frida’s paintings come to life where the film actors appear like models in her original paintings. Young Salma Hayek looks lovely and seductive in a schoolgirl’s uniform, and in the tango scene with Ashley Judd wears a dark red dress cut above and below to accentuate her sensuality. Alfred Molina’s costumes do well to portray him as a pompous, cigar-smoking revolutionary.
In conclusion, ‘Frida,’ correctly lauded as one of the most outstanding films of 2002, is a fantastic biographic portrayal of a brilliant artist who fights against great odds to achieve fame and adulation. By doing this, she proves, in her own words in the film, “At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can.”
Reference
Taymor, Julie. “Frida”. IMDB Movies. 2002.