Film Reviews

Frida

• Rating:
• Director:
• Starring: Alejandro Usigli
• Details: Mex / 118 minutes / (15PG).

Visually impressive but lumpy dramatisation of the life of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, played in an Oscar nominated performance by Salma Hayek. Adopting the standard format of the biopic, albeit with some wonderful technical flourishes, the movie presents a potted history of the painter's traumatic life. Due to her involvement in a bus crash when she was 18, Kahlo endured supreme physical pain for her adult life, and her marriage to fellow artist Diego Riveria (Alfred Molina) was hardly a conventional one. Promising Frida loyalty but not fidelity, she had to put up with plenty of boorish behaviour from her perennially unfaithful husband. Not a woman to be trifled with, Frida too engaged in her fair share of adulterous flings, but a bond existed between the pair that superseded any sexual misadventures.
On the whole, the central performances are effective - Hayek and Molina are clearly passionate about the material - and Taymor's aesthetic sensibilities are intensely vivid, with an animated sequence by the Quay brothers particularly memorable. Where the film falters is with the formulaic structure adopted. With a final draft penned by Ed Norton (who features in a cameo role as Nelson Rockefeller), the screenplay is fairly brisk but inefficient, wheeling through the major events in the painter's life with little real insight. Had Taymor been brave/allowed (delete as applicable, Mr Harvey Weinstein) to follow through on the more visual aspects of the story and perhaps been slightly more critical of her subject, Frida could have been a really impressive movie rather than reasonably engaging one it actually is.

Review by Garreth Murphy