It was Hayden Herrera’s 1983 biography that turned Mexican artist Frida Kahlo into a cult figure. Until then little known outside her native land, Kahlo soon turned into something of an icon once Herrera’s lively account of her life, work and death had caught on. Her life contained all the qualities necessary: the terrible accident when she was a teenager that left her semi-crippled and in pain for the rest of her life, the marriage (well, a marriage and a remarriage) to the communist muralist Diego Riviera, the affairs, one of them with a fugitive Leon Trotsky shortly before he was ice-picked by one of Stalin’s agents, and, of course, the art.
Kahlo’s art was, in fact, the first stage in her ascent to cult status. She herself began the process of mythologisation. Many of her paintings, which blend vibrant folk styles with startling, surreal imagery, are self-portraits, and it is hard not to be captivated by the direct gaze that comes at one out of the pictures — that and the gaudy trappings, the ornate jewellery and bright clothes, the odd pet monkey in attendance. Not to mention the single eyebrow that crosses her forehead in a single stroke.
Her paintings also elevate her suffering to the mythical realm. One of the most famous shows her tortured spinal column as a Grecian pillar, shattered but still upright. In another, her more inward psychological issues are dramatised in a double self-portrait, where she seems the demure married woman on one side, on the other a more dangerous figure, a creature from folklore. There is no doubt that Kahlo was and is a fascinating figure, one in whom life and art are barely separable, and it is easy to see why she is one to whom women, in particular, whether artistically inclined or not, are drawn.
Julie Taymor’s biopic, Frida, takes the viewer all the way from Kahlo’s youth to the brink of her death. It’s all there — the accident, the marriage to Riviera, the affairs (lesbian as well as Trotskyite), the paintings, the suffering. The whole tempestuous life. This movie has been a long time coming, with Madonna, a big Kahlo collector, at one time interested in both producing and starring in such a picture. We should be grateful that that project fell through, and that the movie has fallen into the hands of others.
And yet, it seems to me, Frida is not all it could be. It lacks something. The movie looks great, as befits the story of an artist with so flamboyant a visual style as Kahlo. The sense of a turbulent Thirties and Forties Mexico, in which liberation applies to the political as well as the personal realm, is well conveyed. Alfred Molina, as the mountainous Riviera, as much a glutton when it came to sex as he was with food, is excellent, and he all but steals the movie from Salma Hayek in the titular role.
Hayek is visually right for the part, carrying off with flair the singular Fridan eyebrow, though eschewing the slight moustache that also adorned Kahlo’s face. (That may have been just too much for the average cinema-goer to take.) She has some of the passion Kahlo must have brought to the business of living and painting, but not much else. She’s not terrible as Kahlo, but she does seem to lack the oomph that would be required to drive a biopic of this kind, one in which we must be riveted by the very personality of the central figure. She goes through the motions energetically enough, but I, for one, just didn’t find her very compelling.
Taymor’s direction is assured, but the script appears to lapse at times into uncertainty or cliché. Would people of Kahlo’s time and milieu really have said, “I should have been there for you”? The material does not seem to resolve itself into much more than one damn thing after another. This is often a problem with biopics. Indeed, this is often a problem with life.