Poor Frida Kahlo. Much like that other Latin American revolutionary icon, Ernesto Che Guevara, she never imagined that—to a paraphrase Puerto Rico rock group Fiel a La vega's song "Canciones en la arena,"—a whole cottage industry would be built around her. Just do a quick Google search under her name and you’ll find bracelets, T-shirts, hand fans, fridge magnets, even sleeping masks bearing that now famous unibrow.
And it never fails that year after year, after the Chicago Latino Film Festival announces their call for entries to their annual poster contest, that they receive at least a dozen from around the world bearing her image, even though Frida Kahlo never shot a movie in her life. Just like with Che, the human being behind the icon has been stripped of any meaning.
Frida, the feature documentary debut from editor Carla Gutiérrez, goes a long way in bringing the legendary Mexican painter back down to earth. For those familiar with Julie Taymor’s 2002 biopic, the documentary may seem like a bit of old news. That’s because both films use Hayden Herrera’s comprehensive 1983 biography as a starting point for their films. But while Frida in Taymor’s film is filtered through the sensibilities of scriptwriters Clancy Sigal, Diane Lake, Gregory Nava and Anna Thomas, Gutierrez uses Frida’s illustrated diary, letter, essays and interviews to tell her story. In other words, Frida gets her voice back, the only filters used being those of the actor who reads those texts (Fernanda Echevarría) and the act of condensing forty-plus years of quite an eventful life into a manageable 88 minutes.
As a small child, Frida was the kind of girl who bothered her Catholic priests with such questions as “How was Christ born?” and “Was the Virgin Mary truly a Virgin?” Her atheist father, a photographer, was the only one in her immediate family who read books. But, most importantly, she was precociously attracted to the heroes of the Mexican Revolution and what they stood for, and to the murals the Revolution inspired, especially those of the holy trinity of the muralist movement: David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera. In the university, she dressed in men’s clothes and hung out with men, the D’Artagnan of an all-male club of pranksters and rebels.
And then came that horrific accident of 1925, when a trolley crashed against the bus she and her boyfriend were riding, a metal rod impaling her midsection. Encased in a cast, the accident changed her life; her dreams of becoming a doctor shattered with her spine. She found in painting a refuge from her pain. From there, the documentary hits all the familiar bullet points of her life: her relationship with and eventual marriage to Diego Rivera; their trip to the United States for a solo show of Rivera’s work, what he considered the pinnacle of his career; her miscarriage and how it influenced her painting from then on; their return to Mexico after his mural Man at the Crossroads commissioned by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was destroyed for portraying Lenin and his other commissions were cancelled.
Back in Mexico, they befriend and become the hosts for Leon Trotsky. Trotsky may have become besotted with Friday but it was his secretary who she had an affair with. No mention is made of his murder nor of what Frida felt about it given their close relationship and the fact that it was Stalin himself who ordered Trostky’s assassination. For that matter, little is said about how Frida, as a hardcore communist, felt about the direction her favored ideology had taken under Stalin. In wanting to tell Frida’s life from her own point of view, Gutiérrez overlooks one of the most important elements that defined her character: the politics of the time. And for a woman that challenged the gender politics of the era, there is very little here about her relationships with other women.
Frida is declared a surrealist artist by André Breton, even though she had no idea what it meant. She later grew disdainful of the movement and its pretensions after Breton decided to incorporate clichéd and stereotypical elements to her solo exhibit in France. Surrealism is, for her, “a decadent manifestation of bourgeois art.” Her final days are spent mostly bedridden after multiple operations on her spine. She still finds ways to make art but she can feel the end is near. There is one final exhibit, her first one in Mexico, here represented by archive photos of her arriving in a stretcher to a round of applause, a moment beautifully reenacted by Taymor’s film. She died right afterwards.
Frida’s paintings are an extension of her outer and inner life; they are more than a mirror. She expresses, in colors, shapes and forms, what many writers do with the written word. Which is why the iconography built around them is so distressing; they strip these paintings of their pain, their anger, their magic, their peace and their love. I am not as bothered by Gutiérrez’s decision to animate them, even though I do think she misses a great opportunity in focusing on the details and drawing a line between them and her writings. We hardly ever hear Frida talk about these individual paintings. Yes, she does write about her love for painting, for art, but the film, in a way, denies us the opportunity to hear her evaluate her own work in more specific terms.
The reading of these letters and other writings not only capture her passion but also a quality that has been taken for granted by Frida fans, not to mention most probably forgotten: Frida was a woman that did not suffer fools gladly. Her contempt towards Manhattan’s hoi polloi is palpable. She is equally contemptuous of France’s café-driven intellectual culture where all they do is talk a good game about revolution and change and rights but are not willing to put some skin in the game.
Frida is a film rich in archival material—photos, newsreels, even home movies—that takes you to another time, another place. It all shows us a Frida that is coquettish, daring, happy, patient. But by the end it also shows us a Frida that is tired, her stoic face hiding all that physical pain and anguish that is making life impossible to live. Frida may not be breaking new ground but, like Taymor’s Frida, it does her a huge service by reminding us of the complex, very real woman behind the icon.
Frida is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.