Frida, nature vivante

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.

Frida (1986)

If you manage to find this somewhere (I got my DVD on ebay) you'll see why the actress playing Frida is something of a small legend for her role. Ofelia Medina as the adult Kahlo is quite astonishing, highly believable, and often so Kahlo-like you have to remind yourself this isn't a documentary. She acting.

In fact, the whole movie is convincing in its realism even though it is not especially a "good" movie in other ways. What it lacks mostly is some kind of narrative drive. I don't mean you have to make up a fictional story line, certainly not with someone as amazing as Frida Kahlo, but there has to be something to keep the propulsion going. At the end she dies, and at the beginning she is young and being assessed with a childhood disease, but between it is a series of important things that happened to the artist.

So what you have is a collection of particular moments that really work--the accident aftermath is gruesome and terrifying, the final arrival in her bed at the exhibition is exhilarating--mixed with atmospheric filler, including lots of scenes of people playing music.

One surprising element all along is all the singing, including by Kahlo and even by Rivera. At one point they even have a comic operatic duet as they sing back and forth, quite hilarious and perhaps in keeping with two people filled with life. At times you might think the movie is a musical, but overall it's a low-budget, sincere, genuine feeling biopic. It's that genuine-ness that makes it worth the trip to ebay. Mexico comes across as the real deal, colorful and peppered with what seem like amateur actors, and filmed not in fancied up rooms and courtyards but simple, honest locations.

One of the revelations of this "Frida" is how the more famous 2002 "Frida" looks overly perfect, truly "Hollywood" in its slick, beautiful, colorful rendering of the same subject. Some of the scenes are so similar you realize that this earlier Mexican "Frida" was the template for the later American one (the Trotsky scenes in particular). Certainly the American one is better made and is easier to watch, and will move you. This Mexican one is more a corrective, a realization about who Frida really might have been, and about the falseness of even very good movies.

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.

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.

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.