‘Frida’ By Hal Hinson Washington Post Staff Writer September 07, 1988

Director: Paul Leduc Cast: Ofelia Medina Not rated Compare prices for this movie Find local video stores More movie shopping Save money with NextCard Visa

These details are laid out in a fragmented manner, like pieces of a puzzle scattered onto a carpet. The film is conceived as a deathbed reverie, in which the events of the artist's life slip into her mind (or out of it) in no particular order. We see Kahlo (Ofelia Medina) lounging in her bath, smoking pot and drawing decorations in red lipstick on the body cast from her spinal operation; marching with Rivera (Juan Jose Gurrola) for the Spanish Loyalists; drunk on cognac and swinging in a hammock.

The life that Leduc has chosen to chronicle is rich and eventful, and the filmmaker, who is Mexican-born, has certainly benefited from that. And yet the movie never makes sense out of these fragments or gives us a sense of the woman's spirit that would draw them into a coherent or satisfying whole. The partial portrait we're able to construct is of a dark, charismatic beauty with severe black eyebrows and a flair for the outrageous who led a fashionably bohemian life at the vital center of the Mexican art world of the '30s. All the incidents in her life are set forth without discrimination, as if they were all of equal weight and importance -- as if the biographer's task were only to report and not interpret or give order.

The film's structure -- which must have been born out of the misguided notion that since Kahlo was a modern artist she required a modernist biography -- isn't the only problem. The tone of the film is worshipful, and yet the parlor radicalism of this early art couple comes through. If you didn't know their work, you would be tempted to dismiss them as infuriatingly self-indulgent dilettantes. But nothing could be less dilettantish than the record Kahlo painted of her pain or the stern, searching gaze that bores out from her canvases. Kahlo's art didn't have a wide range -- it was too ingrown for that -- but it had an unsettling, almost demonic urgency. The art has a formidable presence onscreen, and we learn more about Kahlo -- about her sickness, her relationships and her passions -- from the canvases displayed in the film than from anything the director contributes. These pictures, an enormous percentage of which were self-portraits, render biography almost unnecessary.

Leduc, who also cowrote the script, cannot reconcile the contrast between Kahlo's robustness and her affliction, and so he depicts her suffering as merely an aspect of artistic chic. In fact, Leduc spends so much of his time examining the collection of handsome objects surrounding her that you think the film is about them. But the objects are mute, or else Leduc fails to create enough of a context for them to speak to us. Kahlo collected dolls, and in one of her late drawings (done after her leg was removed) saw herself as a broken doll, but nothing of this perception of herself as damaged goods -- or her intense desire to have a child by Rivera -- is expressed in the film. Nor is her extensive dependency on drugs hinted at, nor the possibility that her death was, in fact, a suicide.

Medina is perhaps the greatest casualty of Leduc's approach. Her performance as Kahlo is an extraordinary incarnation, both powerful and deft, and she brings this strikingly contradictory artist close to us -- only to have her director push her away again.

Frida, at the Biograph, is unrated and contains some adult material.

Back to the top