A Dynamic Doc Portrait of Frida Kahlo

My guess is that Frida Kahlo would have loathed “Immersive Frida Kahlo,” the kind of touring exhibit that professes to honor the canvas while bathing it in digital-tech kitsch. And, having seen Carla Gutiérrez’s riveting documentary Frida, I’m certain the artist would have announced her disdain with a laugh and a healthy dose of juicy invective. If you want to immerse yourself in Frida Kahlo, here is the real thing.

Taking the helm for the first time, editor Gutiérrez (RBG, Julia) pushes past the dime-a-dozen “icon” label to face the artist on her own terms, drawing upon Kahlo’s illustrated diaries and letters. The film’s archival riches also include an extraordinary selection of photographs and footage, and the transcripts of interviews with people close to Kahlo by biographer Hayden Herrera, whose 1983 book was the basis of the Julie Taymor biopic starring Salma Hayek.

Whatever that 2002 movie’s strengths and weaknesses, Gutiérrez’s nonfiction portrait (which takes its streaming bow March 15 on Prime Video) is, for starters, uncluttered by the layers of performance that define biographical drama. Frida’s voice cast never diverts attention from the heart and soul of the story, and the exquisite work by Fernanda Echevarría del Rivero, as Kahlo, brings the great artist’s joys, sorrows, fierce intelligence and mouthy humor to life with an intense person-to-person intimacy.

The doc takes rewarding chances in its treatment of Kahlo’s artwork, chances that heighten the emotional connection between the painter and the image without overstepping. With sensitivity and elegance, animation by Sofía Inés Cázares and Renata Galindo adds movement to elements of the paintings and zeroes in on details: A Chihuahua’s tail wags, a plant’s leaves unfurl and sway, the earth cracks. If at certain moments the animation feels unnecessary given the sheer power of the imagery, it’s always in sync with the mood Kahlo is expressing, whether that mood is playful, celebratory or despairing.

Throughout the film, there’s a vibrant interplay between black-and-white footage and the radiance of her palette, with splashes of color occasionally added to the vintage clips like the visual equivalent of Kahlo’s knowing gaze. Víctor Hernández Stumpfhauser’s score, not unlike Kahlo’s singular aesthetic, honors folk roots while branching out into a modern realm of exploration.

As to the biography itself, it begins with photos of a plump toddler with a discerning gaze — hardly a surprise that she would soon be a smartass kid tossed out of class for pestering the priest with questions, or that, as a teen burning with intellectual and sexual hunger, she would hang out with the rebellious boys. Art was not Kahlo’s Plan A; she wanted to be a doctor, but a horrendous 1925 bus accident, when she was 18, would instead turn her into a lifelong patient. “The handrail,” Kahlo recalled, “went through me like a sword through a bull.” The free spirit was trapped, “alone with my soul,” and she began painting.

Emiliano Zapata was a crucial public figure in her childhood, and the film makes clear that through everything she endured — constant physical pain, many surgeries, braces and casts, the endless infidelities of her celebrated husband, Diego Rivera — she never let go of that revolutionary outlook. Art and revolution were resolutely entwined in the frescoes of her beloved Rivera and Mexico’s other great muralists of the early 20th century, David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco. One of the many delights of Frida is hearing her exuberant cursing (via Echevarría del Rivero) about the titans of industry who commissioned works from Rivera, along with the other “rich bitches,” “jerks” and “gringos” who made her seethe.

In New York with Rivera for his 1931 show at MoMA, she notes the vapidity of Fifth Avenue socialites and the desperate straits of working people hit by the Depression, and is drawn to the vitality she finds in Harlem and the city’s immigrant neighborhoods, notably Chinatown. She was the woman behind the acclaimed man, the wife who “gleefully dabbles” in art, as one headline put it. And sometimes she was off to the side, as in a photo that Gutiérrez invites us to ponder: Rivera surrounded by adoring American women at some high society art-world event, with Kahlo at the edge of the frame, facing away, smoking.

Kahlo had her own extramarital adventures, to be sure, among her lovers the on-the-lam Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and numerous famous artists, both men and women. And yet her struggles to accept Rivera’s affairs, as expressed in her writings, are wrenching; they cut through the simplistic “strong woman” stereotype to reveal the anguish and vulnerability that are often strength’s essence.

Perhaps the most searing example of her piercing insight involves her interactions with the French poet André Breton. Upon a visit to Mexico, he found her paintings in sync with the work of the Surrealists, the school of art he led. She knew nothing about them, and though Breton promoted her work in Paris, he also ignited her fury with his condescending use of cheap Mexican tchotchkes in the exhibit, meant as a thematic complement to her visionary canvases. Eventually, disgusted by the armchair revolutionaries she encountered in the salons of Europe, Kahlo concluded that she hated Surrealism. “A decadent manifestation of bourgeois art,” she called it.

Such razor-sharp perceptions and unapologetic pronouncements fuel Frida no less than the unsettling and beautiful images she conjured. Beyond the artistic pretensions she disdained, Kahlo noted that her canvases depicted her life, not the dreamscapes that were central to Surrealism. It was an exceptional life, and here at last is a film that not only honors her without resorting to sensationalism but that also lets her speak. At the end of Gutiérrez’s fine film, you likely will feel the spell of a remarkable person’s company.