Comment

Nov 13, 2018Punnoval rated this title 2.5 out of 5 stars
Quasi-documentaries about artists/writers are notoriously hard to do as their ideas/feelings don't extend to screen performances easily. That is the main problem with Frida. The director (Taymor) instead chooses to concentrate on sex, drinking and (to a lesser extent) physical pain without a great deal of success. The politics are especially problematic. Why are Rivera/Kahlo members of the Trotskyite version of the Communist party? You get no feel for it here and their politics seems as staid as that in Hilary Clinton's Democratic party. The only plus for this picture is that it inspires some desire to find out more about Kahlo's life. Perhaps a film-maker using magic realism might have been able to do something with this. It certainly would have been interesting seeing if the Thai master Apichatpong Weerasethakul could have made this tale like his 2006 item "Syndromes and a Century". Even the present director (Taymor) might have taken inspiration from the past and cast it as a puppet show.