Overall Rating
 Awesome: 50.91%
Worth A Look: 18.18%
Average: 16.36%
Pretty Bad: 14.55%
Total Crap: 0%
3 reviews, 37 user ratings
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| Frida |
by Stephen Groenewegen
"From the art"
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Frida is a striking, colorful recount of the life of Mexican artist and icon, Frida Kahlo. As with so many of these artist biopics (the most recent being Ed Harris’ Pollock), Frida was a labour of love for its star, Salma Hayek, who also co-produced the film.Hayek may feel a great spiritual connection to the woman, and has a convincing resemblance when made up and wearing Frida’s clothes, but there’s something flat about her performance. Hayek acts up when Frida is fiery, spitting in anger at her disloyal husband, the womanising artist Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina). She smoulders and suffers for all she’s worth and has real spirit when seducing radical photographer Tina Modotti (Ashley Judd) at a party. But that spirit is too often lacking. Perhaps Hayek felt constrained by having to convey Frida’s constant, agonising pain. Director Julie Taymor recreates the trolley car accident that later caused endless medical complications in Frida’s life with an exotic visual flourish early in the film.
Taymor’s imaginative design concept for Frida is its saviour. She takes her cue from the paintings, shooting Hayek mostly in centre frame and dressed in bright colours, like one of Frida’s famous self-portraits. The bold, vibrant background colours are also derived from Frida’s art. It gives the film a strong unifying look. The work of Taymor’s collaborators, many of them Mexican, adds to the ocular pleasure - cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, production designer Felipe Fernández del Paso, art director Bernardo Trujillo and also costume designer Julie Weiss. Elliot Goldenthal’s Mexican-tinged score is, most likely, different to anything you’ve heard from him before.
Taymor’s tricks and gags give life to the film, and include animated Day of the Dead skeletons in the hospital after Frida’s accident, and a King Kong pastiche when Frida and Diego visit New York in 1930 (three years before King Kong was released, but never mind). Best of all are sequences when a motionless Hayek slowly shimmers into life, walking out of one of Frida’s canvases.
Occasionally, Taymor’s instincts backfire. When Frida visits cities as vibrant as New York and Paris, it’s hard to accept her as the only splash of colour. But the vivid images help distract from the prosaic screenplay, credited to Clancy Sigel, Diane Lake, Gregory Nava and Anna Thomas (with an uncredited polish by Hayek’s beau, Edward Norton). Too often, the lumpy, simplified dialogue sounds like something out of a school play. And the pacing of Frida’s story is confusing. Her final years – during which Diego returned and they remarried – are compressed into 10 minutes. In reality, their second marriage lasted 14 years until Frida’s death, but here, Diego returns on what seems to be a passing whim.
Frida fails to convince as a great love story. Frida and Diego spend so much time fighting and taking separate lovers it’s hard to believe in them as soul mates. The bear like Molina sometimes channels his jealous artist lover of Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears. A string of Hollywood stars play historical cameos - Ashley Judd, Antonio Banderas as David Alfaro Siqueiros, Edward Norton as Nelson Rockefeller and Geoffrey Rush as Leon Trotsky (Diego Luna from Y tu mamá también also shows up as Frida’s first boyfriend). Only Rush stays long enough to establish more than a fleeting presence. But we’re mostly too busy watching Frida for other characters to come to life.At one point, Rivera describes Frida’s art as “agonised poetry on canvas”. There’s more agony than poetry in this film (too many lovers, not enough art). Eventful as Frida’s life was, it’s the film’s distinctive appearance you remember afterwards, not what takes place within the frame.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=6258&reviewer=104
originally posted: 12/19/02 17:26:38
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2003 Palm Springs Film Festival. For more in the 2003 Palm Springs Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
25-Oct-2002 (R)
UK
N/A
Australia
26-Dec-2002
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