Becoming Frida Kahlo

Becoming Frida Kahlo

I must say this was a self-indulgent sycophantic mess, the first episode merely showed her birth, the influence of her parents, going to school and being involved in a terrible accident. Largely it was unremarkable and nearly everything that was said was opinion rather than having any concrete foundation. For example "Frida has to reinvent herself from scratch", Frida was 20 years of age, the first boyfriend was sent to Europe following the accident as his parents thought Frida an unsuitable match, but to infer so much from a first teenage platonic relationship is quite absurd. They really over-milked the cow!

With regard to the art, they state "she painted without external influences and created her own path, total tosh her artwork looks a pale copy of Diego Rivera and she absorbed every local and international art influence of the time, Kahlo did not invent surrealist art it influenced her.

Why this programme was all so slow I have no clue, we could have cover this in an hour.

The programme glosses over the ugly reality that Frida as a school girl was groomed by the serial womaniser Diego Rivera and married to him when she was 22 and he was 44.

The show keeps making bizarre political statements, firstly capitalism and wealthy people are not threatened by the left or communists, as they consider them deluded, knowing that tax receipts from capitalism pay for philanthropy and/or the welfare state. The truth is Rivera and Kahlo lived off wealthy peoples commissions all their artistic lives. To further infer any painter is the leader of any political movement is absurd, an artistic skill does not imply a vast eduction and/or intellect and every waking moment is devoted to art not arguing the rights and wrongs on any society.

If only they had focused on her work, as her life is only of interest in how it influenced this or that painting. Frida did only 143 paintings in her life, this is nothing in comparison to others, of these 143 paintings 55 paintings are self-portraits. To suggest she therefore has the stature of a Mexican Dali is massaging the obvious reality, her work is interesting at best but most of it is deeply derivative of Rivera and really quite self-indulgent. Lastly it is quite inexplicable that Kahlo is regarded a champion of women and the downtrodden when clearly this documentary of 3 hours demonstrated the complete opposite.

This documentary lacked authenticity over many of the facts, and failed to critique the artwork comprehensively, I'm giving this a 4 outta 10.

Firstly, while watching this documentary I noticed that the nudity in the art was blurred out. Maybe this was just for television but considering it was produced for television this seems to tell me it's a choice the director and producers made. Astonishing to me that this would be done even for TV considering the fact that Kahlo intentionally included non-sexual nudity to express vulnerability (take for example the Henry Ford Hospital painting expressing her pain following a miscarriage). I genuinely think this is abhorrent to do, censorship - even self-censorship - is wrong, full stop. Anyone so afraid of the human form has no business making or watching a documentary about a painter, let alone Kahlo of all people.

Beyond that the documentary, like many modern documentaries, seems more concerned with uplifting the subjects than examining and analyzing them. Every fault is glossed over, every poor decision left unremarked - everything Diego did excused everything Kahlo did and vice versa. She was remarkable, she was influential, but no person is saintly.

What was appreciated was the clean timeline of events and interspersing her words and thoughts among them, though the lack of a thick accent in the voiceover was an odd decision. I also thought the soundtrack could have been more inclusive of Mexican music. I want to say it was a Clair De Lune interpolation running in the background and it seemed odd to choose a French song, maybe the most famous French song of all time, for a mestizo artist with a German father.

I'd recommend it for people who already like the artist or her work but it is not the best documentary for people who know anything less than the typical reductive "unibrow lady", they'll receive a relatively base level knowledge despite the overindulgent runtime. Sometimes I think documentaries like this would be better made by people with no strong feelings for the subject so as not to lionize a person that is already well-regarded. I'm not asking for hit-pieces but objectivity is best.