Frida Kahlo - Es lebe das Leben

Not knowing the history and something about the life of Frida, this film is not understandable by anyone. It reflects the life of Frida Kahlo, a famous Mexican painter, more famous because of her political position and her love and relationships with painter of mural like Diego Rivera and political person as Liev Trostky. The main characteristic of the film is the lack of dialogues, so, again, not knowing the history it will be difficult to understand the plot. In a scene one may hear the voice of Trostky in French giving the message to Frida, where he invited her to have love and sex with him. In another one there is a bitter dialogue among Trostky, Rivera and Frida, where Trostky speaks in Russian through a woman-translator (the Russian language here is the worst of the world, badly pronounced as if Trostky was not Russian). It is clear that Mexican communists at that time were loyal to Stalin and organized the plots to kill Trostky. The other famous Mexican painter of mural, Alfaro Siqueiros, was against Trostky and behaves as a terrorist.

The life of Frida was abnormal in general, she was a lover of several men and also a lesbian one; she suffered her problems with legs and the problems of the Mexican society. Frida's character was complex and the film reflected it well.

Anyone interested in see this film should in anticipation read about Mexico's history and the major events of the early 20th Century.

After watching Frida for my Spanish class, I learned a lot about the history of Frida and what exactly her trade mark meant. The movie displays the life of Frida and what she meant to the Mexican culture. Through her artwork, her life with her husband and her illness is all portrayed. The time period was during the depression and world wars. A lot of her life during the movie is seen through a mirror signifying her life was shattered in the end. A lot of Mexican culture is shown through her husband, Diego, as well as Frida. The lady who plays Frida in the movie looks exactly like the original and does an awesome job being Frida. This movie has a lot to offer. It demonstrates the Mexican history, culture, and life of others during this time period. I would recommend using this film to teach students about Frida as well as the culture and history of Mexico.

Mexican-born director Paul Leduc's 1984 look at the life of prominent Latin American painter Frida Kahlo, Frida, Naturaleza Viva, is a slow-paced, quiet, and poetic film told through image and song rather than narrative plot. Vastly different from the Julie Traymore version of Frida of 2002, a standard biopic that focused on her tempestuous relationships, it is told through fragmentary accounts of different events in Frida Kahlo's life using impressionistic flashbacks from her deathbed. Ofelia Median is perfect as Frida, fully capturing her passion, fighting spirit, and sensuality as well as her painful self-absorption as revealed in her numerous self portraits and disturbing depictions of body parts.

The film depicts Frida's painful physical condition as the result of a bus accident when she was eighteen, her radical politics, bisexuality, miscarriage, the amputation of her leg, and her relationships with Diego Rivera, Leon Trotsky, and David Siquieros. It omits, however, any discussion of Rivera's womanizing, her divorce and remarriage, drug use and drinking, or her embrace of Stalinism in her later years. The end result is a hauntingly beautiful but incomplete portrait of a remarkable woman that makes you want to run to the nearest bookstore to learn more about her life and art.

The first thing you have to keep in mind is the format of the movie (8mm), and unfortunately the transfer to DVD was not made very well (the sound is pretty poor).

Nevertheless it is an interesting little movie that feels more like a surrealist's dream than a movie proper.

The dialogue is practically non-existent, thus you are left with small vignettes and images of relevant moments in the life of the artist, this may appear confusing if you don't know much about Frida and Diego, but if you do it is quite a poetic view abut their life together.

This is a movie made before Frida Khalo became a global feminist icon, conceived before all the hype generated by the rich and famous endorsing her and perhaps worth to watch just for this reason. reason.

I have watched Salma Hayek's movie before this one, so at the beginning I thought it was a terrible movie. When I was half way through it I changed my mind. Few words are spoken in this movie and many scenes are unrelated, and it was intentionally made this way. It doesn't want to provide us with a lot of information about Frida, Diego Rivera and Mexico at the time, but rather show us Frida's feelings in different situations; how she loved her father, wanted to have a baby,became tremendously happy when receiving the painting colors in the hospital etc.. The music helps us to understand and apprehend these feelings. Yet her character is poorly represented and so is her relationship with her husband. We see here every once in a while in somebody's else's arms, flirting with Trotsky and kissing some lady, but I really don't understand why. The movie was also a little bit boring. I give it 5 out of 10.