Review of Frida, directed by Julie Taymor

Frida Kahlo has been one of those figures that I’ve always been curious about. I’ve read quite a bit of nonfiction about her life, and even visited some of her most iconic paintings at the Museum of Modern Art and National Museum of Women in the Arts multiple times. Sometime in the near future, I hope to visit her house.

Something I’ve been grappling with is how her image has been commodified, and how if she were still alive today, she would probably be horrified by that fact. Frida was a well-known Communist, and I don’t think she would appreciate how her image is now associated with rampant consumerism.

Anyways, my knowledge of this movie has always been there, but I never got around to watching it. If you have to know something about me, it’s that I procrastinate a lot on what I should be watching way before. It takes me years sometimes to get to a movie I was excited about when it first dropped.

So I finally watched this movie recently, and here are my thoughts!

The story of Frida Kahlo, and how complicated her life and artistry was.

We begin this movie when Frida Kahlo was a teenager. She’s still attending school at this time, and one day she boards a bus. The year is 1925, and when the bus starts moving, it crashes with a streetcar.

This severely injures Frida, as she was literally impaled by a metal pole. This is going to cripple her for the rest of her life, and immediately after the accident, she is bedridden. Her father buys her a canvas so she can do art, so Frida doesn’t go completely insane just laying there.

Soon, she begins walking again with the help of a cane. With it, she comes across the artist Diego Rivera, and asks him to critique the paintings she made while she was bedridden. Rivera thinks she is a genius, and he immediately falls in love with her.

Frida reciprocates this, but the road ahead of them is full of cheating and major arguments between the two. He does propose to her, but she gives him an ultimatum: she wants him to be loyal to her. He does end up cheating on her with a lot of women, but Frida, who is bisexual, does just the same.

Eventually, Rivera is asked to paint a mural in New York City, and in 1934 the two of them decide to go and do it. It will be inside of Rockefeller Center, but this trip is plagued by poor health. Frida has a miscarriage, and then she needs to go back to Mexico when her mother passes away.

Diego also refuses to compromise for Rockefeller’s demands, and ends up stopping the mural and destroying it. The two go back to Mexico, and Frida’s sister Cristina moves in with the two. Cristina and Diego start sleeping together, and Frida leaves the house and becomes an alcoholic after discovering them in bed together.

The two meet again though during Dia de los Muertos, and Leon Trotsky arrives in Mexico and seeks asylum with them. Frida gets together with Trotsky, and when his wife finds out, the two leave Frida’s home permanently. It also creates a rift with Diego when he finds out about this relationship.

Turns out Diego just doesn’t like it when she’s with men seen as higher than him. He ends up asking her for a divorce, and Trotsky is assassinated. Kahlo is arrested for it when they cannot find Diego, and Cristina collects her from jail after Diego begged the president.

Her health takes a turn for the worse, though, as her toes need to be cut off. Diego ends up asking her to marry him again, and she agrees. Her health continues to get bad, and she has a leg removed and is bedridden. In her final years, she needs to be carried to her first exhibition in 1953.

Something to note about this movie is that the dramatic scenes are interspersed with more artistic ones. Life really imitates art here, especially as they deliberate how to replicate her paintings.

Overall Thoughts

I found this interpretation of Frida’s life to be a compelling one. It does focus less on her art and more on her personal life, which I do think is a tad reductive. The personal is very much woven together with her art.

Salma Hayek does an excellent job though, as she was one of the standout performances in this movie. I enjoyed this overall, but it certainly takes it creative liberties in some ways.

So if you’re interested, watch it if you haven’t already! There’s a lot to appreciate in biopics like this.

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