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Massively documented and celebrated as both artist and cult icon, Mexican painter Frida Kahlo might not seem to merit a new screen study — particularly after Julie Taymor’s deliriously self-indulgent 2002 biopic Frida. But here is a documentary, also named Frida, by Peruvian-American director Carla Gutiérrez.
This film’s USP is that it uses Kahlo’s own words, taken from her diaries, offering a predominantly first-person narrative in voiceover. Other testimonies come from Kahlo’s husband, the muralist Diego Rivera, and those around them (including Surrealist kingpin André Breton, here voiced in distractingly Clouseau-accented English).
The chronological narrative takes us from Kahlo’s beginnings as a cross-dressing teenage rebel; through her marriage to Rivera and adoption of the braided hairstyle and Tehuana dresses that became her trademark; to her initially overshadowed status as the maestro’s wife who “dabbled” in painting, as an American headline put it. We hear Kahlo on the horrific 1925 bus accident that would leave her chronically in pain, and on her eventual success in her own right after she and Rivera divorced. The film also amply documents the couple’s fraught open relationship, and Kahlo’s buoyantly professed delight in sex with numerous lovers, male and female.
But Gutiérrez opts for a restlessly glossy style, amplifying the drama of the paintings which hardly need to be made more intense by animation; even in the black and white archive footage, she part-colourises certain images. This is documentary as virtual coffee-table book, just one step away from an Immersive VR Frida Kahlo Experience. But there is no denying that Frida has a riveting story to tell, and the myriad photographs of Kahlo show a figure of uncontainable visual charisma, who knew it too.
★★☆☆☆
In UK cinemas from March 8
