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Frida (2002)
Sep. 19th, 2010 10:40 pmI heard good things about this film when it was new, but I passed it by, because I generally don't care for bio-pics and I'm frankly not very interested in Frida Kahlo: not my type of artist.
But having more recently seen two other films by Julie Taymor that impressed the gizzard out of me, I figured that anything she would take the trouble to make would be worth seeing, so I rented this. It must be popular: most of the library copies were out, and on closer inspection most of them were due in 2005. I finally found one in an obscure branch in the deepest outer suburbs.
And it was quite good. It totally lacked the mechanical and rote qualities of most bio-pics I've seen (including Pollock). Though framed as a biography, it's somewhat lacking as a full account - most of the mature Frida's characteristics come out of nowhere, as far as the film is concerned - and it's really more a time-spanning account of her fraught romance with Diego Rivera. Lots of infidelities and canoodling on both sides; there's more sex here than painting. (Did you know that Frida had an affair with Trotsky?)
But there's a lot of painting, as well, with not a drop of the usual tendentious film nonsense of how art is created, and here Taymor's brilliant visual sense comes out, especially in several scenes where paintings of people imperceptibly morph into real persons and come to life. In this context it's very magical realist, and the bus crash which smashed and punctured Frida's body at the age of 18 is handled the same way.
The characters have some fun, but like all Taymor's films the story is presented very seriously. Rivera's Rockefeller Center mural disaster lacks the sublime goofiness of the same story as presented in Cradle Will Rock, but the circumstances in which it happened are clearer.
This is a film of less genius than Titus or Across the Universe, but it's excellent enough, and a superb tribute to its subject.
But having more recently seen two other films by Julie Taymor that impressed the gizzard out of me, I figured that anything she would take the trouble to make would be worth seeing, so I rented this. It must be popular: most of the library copies were out, and on closer inspection most of them were due in 2005. I finally found one in an obscure branch in the deepest outer suburbs.
And it was quite good. It totally lacked the mechanical and rote qualities of most bio-pics I've seen (including Pollock). Though framed as a biography, it's somewhat lacking as a full account - most of the mature Frida's characteristics come out of nowhere, as far as the film is concerned - and it's really more a time-spanning account of her fraught romance with Diego Rivera. Lots of infidelities and canoodling on both sides; there's more sex here than painting. (Did you know that Frida had an affair with Trotsky?)
But there's a lot of painting, as well, with not a drop of the usual tendentious film nonsense of how art is created, and here Taymor's brilliant visual sense comes out, especially in several scenes where paintings of people imperceptibly morph into real persons and come to life. In this context it's very magical realist, and the bus crash which smashed and punctured Frida's body at the age of 18 is handled the same way.
The characters have some fun, but like all Taymor's films the story is presented very seriously. Rivera's Rockefeller Center mural disaster lacks the sublime goofiness of the same story as presented in Cradle Will Rock, but the circumstances in which it happened are clearer.
This is a film of less genius than Titus or Across the Universe, but it's excellent enough, and a superb tribute to its subject.
