In her own words, ‘Frida’ adds color to Kahlo’s story
Among the many things we learn about Mexican artist Frida Kahlo in the elegant, intimate documentary “Frida” is that she was not particularly fond of the United States. Although her artist husband, Diego Rivera, preferred the U.S. to Mexico, Kahlo found Rivera’s rich American patrons vulgar and easily impressed.
This makes you wonder what Kahlo, who died in 1954, would think of her unibrow’s punctuation of American pop culture over the past several decades. Emblazoned on Tshirts and coffee mugs, reproductions of Kahlo’s exaggerated self-portraits still serve as a kind of shorthand for feminism, queerness, art by women and Mexico itself.
Premiering Thursday, March 14, on Prime Video, “Frida” delivers revelations about a person we assumed we already knew, from books, previous documentaries, the 2002 Salma Hayek biopic of the same name, or as addenda related to Rivera’s San Francisco murals (not part of this documentary). The new film by documentary editor (“RBG”) turned director Carla Gutierrez distinguishes itself by using the artist’s own words — largely taken from Kahlo’s illustrated diary — to tell her story.
Fernanda Echevarría del Rivero’s vigorous, nuanced voice acting, recorded in Spanish, brings those words to life, as do inventive animations of Kahlo’s paintings. But the freshest visual element is spot color that enlivens black-and-white photos. When used subtly, the conceit almost involuntary draws the eye to a particular part of a photo. But the effect works best in vibrant, more obvious bursts that correspond with Kahlo’s artistic temperament or emotional temperature.
“Frida” includes the usual top lines present in most accounts — Kahlo’s iconoclasm, near-fatal bus accident as a teenager and devotion to Rivera despite his rampant cheating. But the documentary’s firsthand nature makes other works about Kahlo seem incomplete, or at least presumptuous. Kahlo either suggests or outright states that her youthful attraction to men’s clothes and a male friend group and her later desire to have a son with Rivera resulted from a belief that men held all the power. Although pragmatic and even savvy, this approach was not exactly feminist. That component would arrive later, after Kahlo found her own distinctive painting style apart from Rivera’s influence.
“Frida” also dispels the idea (actually perpetuated by Rivera in an interview this film excerpts) that theirs was a union of bohemians unconstrained by monogamy. It might have become that, but it started with terrible jealousy on Kahlo’s side. In a poignant diary entry, Kahlo grasps at the fact Rivera married her as evidence he might care for her more than other women.
Kahlo famously had affairs of her own, with men and women. But in a rare narrative slip, “Frida” reduces Kahlo’s own displays of sexual freedom to a kind of greatest-hits montage of flirtatious missives to artists who might or might not have been her lovers, including Georgia O’Keeffe.
Painting eventually outweighed every other element of Kahlo’s life, and she expressed definite ideas about how her art should be displayed. Kahlo was dismayed, for instance, that Surrealist French poet André Breton, who visited her in Mexico, wanted to include pieces he bought at Mexican markets in a Paris exhibition of Kahlo’s paintings. These were ordinary objects, Kahlo pointed out in a diary entry.
While this excerpt shows Kahlo knew her worth, it also disheartens. It would be nicer to think Kahlo died unaware of the attempted tchotchke-ification of her art.