Also this issue: The Player Campbell Scott is a smooth-talking smoothie, but is he happy? -Sam Adams Hotsy 'Qatsi Closing out the Koyaanisqatsi trilogy. -Sam Adams new continuing Showtimes repertory film Screen Picks -Sam Adams

October 31-November 6, 2002

movies

Frida, Be Me

Broken-arted: Frida Kahlo (Salma Hayek) and Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina) share a rare happy moment.

Frida is more about its director and secondary characters than its ostensible subject.

by Cindy Fuchs

Julie Taymor’s Frida pulses with color. Bright reds, lime greens, deep blues, and crisp yellows: Most are borrowed from Frida Kahlo’s paintings, all approximate the dynamic fervor of her brief, tumultuous life.

At its best, the film draws brilliantly imaginative energy from these images. When Frida (played by Salma Hayek, who spent some eight years pulling this project together) marries Mexican muralist Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina), their wedding portrait comes alive, their stiff figures seeming to melt from their stiff poses, to join a party of celebrants forming around them. Or the process reverses, and life becomes a painting, as when she miscarries, and paints herself, prone, broken and exposed, the fetus floating above her, bloody and raw.

This innovative melding of art and biography grants Taymor's film -- written by Clancy Sigal, Diane Lake, Gregory Nava and Anna Thomas, and based on a biography by Hayden Herrera -- an uncanny and welcome grace. Certainly, these moments reflect the reasons for making the movie to begin with: the rich textures of the artist's experience, the grand scope of the legend that has since grown up around her. They don't come often enough, so that the film lapses into mundane biopic structure. But when they do come, they suggest something of the artist's brilliance, as well as her struggles with perpetual, various pain.

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It's well known that Frida Kahlo suffered mightily and throughout her life, emotionally, spiritually and physically. This pain became the primary source of her art (her many self-portraits are her most famous legacy) as well as a dreadful, inevitable focus. The film opens in 1953, with Frida flat on her back, in the bed that will become her death bier. (She was cremated, per her wishes: "burn this Judas of a body.") Lips red, jewelry gleaming, Frida looks up at the mirror above her, on the bed's wooden canopy, and the film takes you back in time.

It's a familiar device, surely (though seeing Salma Hayek running through a hallway in a schoolgirl's uniform is vaguely startling), and it sends the film into familiar territory. This first part shows that she was a rebellious, willful, sensual child, having sex with her boyfriend in the closet, joining in a family photo dressed in a man's suit, harassing the famous Diego Rivera while he's at her school to paint a mural.

From here, the film introduces the first of the "two big accidents" that afflict Frida: the 1925 trolley wreck that breaks her back and leaves her in a body cast for years. (In fact, Frida's pain began much earlier, with polio at age 6, but the film leaves this out -- too much?) The crash occurs as if it's a ghastly dream: the trolley skids, she sees the wall coming at her, she appears crumpled, her body covered in the gold leaf she's just seen in a craftsman's hand, an instant before the disaster. The film cuts to a gorgeously grotesque animated sequence, creepy dance-of-death skeletons who transform into her doctors, listing her broken bones and offering a grim prognosis.

Throughout Frida's recovery, her photographer father (Roger Rees) dotes on her, while her mother (Patricia Reyes Spíndola) frets that her chance for proper marriage is over. This standard parental divide more or less sets up Frida's lifelong investment in genderfuck: She rejects expectations that girls should stay home and cook, throwing herself into her painting and politics (she and Diego were dedicated Communists) with bracing enthusiasm. When Diego asks her to marry him (admiring that she is "a woman with cajones"), she articulates these principles and so, the film's thematic focus: If Diego, 21 years her senior and a notorious philanderer with two failed marriages behind him, cannot promise fidelity, he must be loyal. He agrees, they wed, serial disasters ensue.

The movie's liberties in depicting said disasters can be silly, as when Frida beds Leon Trotsky (Geoffrey Rush), or wins Diego's heart by out-drinking him and muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros (Antonio Banderas, on screen for about two minutes), then dancing a sexy tango with photographer Tina Modotti (an unconvincing Ashley Judd), or engages in a one-scene "affair" with Josephine Baker in Paris. (The moment is so sensational and so undermotivated that you may wonder what it has to do with anything.)

At other times, the film is more expansive, less interested in including figures or events than in complicating and contextualizing specific (usually renowned) events. Frida's barroom encounter with "Death" is heartbreaking solely because of singer Chavela Vargas' riveting performance. More creative is the film's representation of Frida and Diego's arrival in New York as a series of mobile 3D postcard images. While passing her time at a movie house, Frida imagines her husband as King Kong; he engages in revolving door sexual liaisons (depicted literally), and she has her own tryst with one of his conquests (forgettable Saffron Burrows). The most painful meltdown in their relationship comes when she discovers Diego's affair with Frida's sister Christina (Mía Maestro), at which point the trajectory changes. Unfortunately, with less Diego, the film suffers.