Frida Kahlo - Es lebe das Leben

I bought this one while I was in Mexico, still trying to calm down the excitement over seeing Frida's house. I wouldn't compare it to the Hollywood version of Frida because, while both of them are excellent, Naturaleza viva adds something very authentic, very very Frida-like to the story. I agree, this movie is probably not for those not familiar with Frida's biography or the political events that took place during her lifetime. My favorite part was definitely the producer's ability to capture Frida's pain - the driving force of her entire existence. Ofelia Medina portrays Frida the way she was. Bold, unbreakable and, probably, somewhat insane. Like all artists. The movie is less dramatic than its Hollywood counterpart, but it succeeds in immortalizing Frida's personality. There's no need for a better-developed plot because, really, this film is about Frida the thinker, the artist, the lover. It's a window into her mind.

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.

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.

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.

So far this is the best film made from Frida Kahlo's life and work, with an outstanding performance by wonderful actress and leftist activist Ofelia Medina. Ofelia was the force behind the project and should be credited as the single person who helped to rediscover Kahlo in the 1980s. The artist was known, of course, but she had not been turned into an icon of rebellion and hight art by then, so Ofelia was able to film in Kahlo's blue house in Coyoacán (where children could play, since nobody cared, before it was turned into a museum) and use the real paintings. She had asked filmmaker Paul Leduc to direct, but the only funding she got was 800 dollars from producer Manuel Barbachano Ponce who, after seeing the rushes, wanted everybody to sell their rights, arguing the footage had no value. Medina and Leduc were not fooled. I still remember the reaction when the motion picture opened at La Habana film festival, winning prizes as Best Film and Actress. With almost no dialogue, through songs, vivid colors, and Medina's body, everything important and meaningful about Kahlo's art, pain and passion was conveyed. The actress first studied dance, and then trained in "panic theatre", under the guidance of "guru" Alejandro Jodorowsky during the 1960s. Her motion picture is a milestone, the flower of the so-called New Latin American cinema during the 1980s, and an important statement for the creative freedom of the filmmakers of Spanish-speaking American countries.