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Frida
A visually-stirring biopic of revered Mexican artist Frida Kahlo from Titus director Julie Taymor. Breathtaking, wry and painfully truthful
"If you're a real painter," says Diego Rivera (Molina), when he meets his future wife Frida Kahlo (Hayek), "you'll paint until you die." Death, so often celebrated in Mexican culture, is very much at the heart of Julie Taymor's illuminating biopic Kahlo. The film begins with a flash-forward, as a bed-ridden Kahlo is carried to the first exhibition of her work, despite being close to the end of her life (she died in 1954). As we wind back to 1922, we soon understand that death dominated her life - and would eventually influence her painting. Her right leg crippled by polio as a child, Frida's "Judas of a body", as she later called it, would be twisted almost beyond repair after a bus accident nearly ended her life. Much of the first quarter of the film deals with her isolated recovery, as she learns to walk again, taking solace in her love of painting. By the time she meets Rivera, the image of the bed, initially symbolic of her sickness, comes to represent the infidelity that would rot their relationship to the core. With much of the film belonging to the impressive Hayek and Molina (who gained significant weight to play the role), as it concentrates on their characters' tempestuous relationship, the support cast is virtually a series of cameos. Edward Norton (who also worked on the script, though remains without a writer credit) plays Nelson Rockefeller, the billionaire who commissions Rivera to paint a mural in the Rockefeller Center, only to object to the portrait of Lenin that finds its way on the wall. Ashley Judd and Antonio Banderas play photographer Tina Modotti and muralist David Siqueiros respectively, though both are confined to one scene. Likewise Saffron Burrows, as a fictitious woman Frida has a brief fling with. Only Geoffrey Rush, as the exiled Leon Trotsky (housed by Rivera and Kahlo), is given sufficient time to create a character. While this can be distracting, and revealing of how much of Kahlo's life the script has had to skip over, Taymor's idiosyncratic visuals (this was the woman who created the renowned stage version of 'The Lion King' remember) more than make up for the truncated feel to the story. From stop-motion animation of Kahlo's paintings to a sequence where Rivera is seen as King Kong famously climbing a skyscraper, Taymor is consistently innovative in the way she illustrates her subject. Demonstrating a true understanding of Kahlo, this is no by-the-numbers biopic but an enterprising tribute to a remarkable woman. Verdict Crowned by an immensely moving performance from Salma Hayek, Frida is both a triumphant portrait of an artist as a young woman and an ambitious, if sometimes unwieldy, history of Mexican social upheaval in the first half of the twentieth century. |
