‘Frida’ Review: Popular Mexican Painter Speaks for Herself in Doc Drawn From Kahlo’s Diaries
20.01.2024 - 23:01
/ variety.com
Carlos Aguilar The image of Frida Kahlo, the prominent Mexican painter of the early 20 century, is one of the most replicated and commercialized of any artist in the history of the world. From T-shirts to houseware, merchandise of all sorts emblazoned with her face has turned Kahlo into a kitschy, mainstream, decontextualized emblem for Mexican identity.
It doesn’t help that the vast majority of her works are self-portraits. Onscreen, the Salma Hayek-starring Hollywood biopic from director Julie Taymor and Paul Leduc’s 1983’s Mexican-production “Frida Still Life” attempted to decipher the tehuana-clad iconoclast via scripted portrayals.
With all that cultural and media baggage on her shoulders, Carla Gutiérrez dares to construct a documentary using a unique approach to such an imposing subject. An editor taking on directorial duties for the first time, Gutierrez is no stranger to assembling nonfiction portraits of major figures, having cut titles like “RGB” and “Chavela” (coincidently about one of Kahlo’s numerous lovers, late Costa Rican-born singer Chavela Vargas).
Told mostly in Spanish, Gutiérrez’s “Frida” succinctly encompasses her entire life and career linearly with the notable feature that its poignant, first-person insight was mined directly from Kahlo’s own writing, including her illustrated diary. Tasked with voicing Frida, performer Fernanda Echevarría del Rivero summons the woman’s defiant essence, giving precise intonation to each sentence — sometimes cheeky, others solemn — to convincingly incarnate Kahlo’s personality solely with words that accompany the visual components, including segments of previously unseen archival footage.
The website popstar.one is an aggregator of news from open sources. The source is indicated at the beginning and at the end of the announcement. You can
send a complaint on the news if you find it unreliable.