10 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE November 22, 2002

eveningsout

After 10-year effort, artist's bigraphy comes to screen

Frida

Directed by Julie Taymor

Reviewed by Kaizaad Kotwal

Mexican artist Frida Kahlo lived her entire life on the fine edge that separates passion from pain.

Sometimes it was the pain of passion that motivated her love life and at others it was the passion of pain that she used to create her vivid art works

Broadway director Julie Taymor (The Lion King) has brought the life of Frida

Kahlo to the big screen. To be more accurate, it is Latina actress Salma Hayek who has nurtured this project for the past ten years, finally able to bring it to life on celluloid. A few years ago there were three competing projects on the artist's biography, including Hayek's version. Madonna and Jennifer Lopez were also vying to be the first to bring Kahlo to the cinema. Hayek won out and for the most part her pains have paid off beautifully.

Kahlo was an indomitable spirit-artistically, humanistically and sexually. She lived life on the edge and broke down

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Frida Kahlo (Salma Hayek, right) tangoes with Tina Modotti (Ashley Judd).

many barriers, both artistically and culturally. She suffered a debilitating injury in a bus accident; her spine was forever damaged. She lived the rest of her life in insufferable pain, eventually losing her toes and finally a leg to her injuries.

She also had a lifelong romance with fellow Mexican artist Diego Rivera, a muralist with a penchant for voluptuous women and unbridled sex. As Kahlo painfully tells Rivera in the film, "I have had two accidents in my life. One was the bus. The other was you." She and Rivera had a torrid and tumultuous love affair lasting over 25 years. They divorced and remarried, so strong was their inability to stay away from each other.

And while Rivera had been with more women than he could count, Kahlo too had her dalliances with men and women. She had a brief tryst with famed Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky (played by Geoffrey Rush).

Kahlo was an unabashed bisexual who celebrated beauty in whatever flesh she could find it. She reveled in dressing up in men's garb from time to time, and upon her first split-up with Rivera, she chopped off her hair and wore men's clothing for a while.

There is a scene early on in the film when Kahlo attends a party with Rivera and is introduced to a group of emerging artists and political revolutionaries. Here Kahlo takes a fancy for Tina Modotti (played by a terribly-accented Ashley Judd) and the sultry tango that ensues between the two is worth the price of admission alone. The film tackles Kahlo's bisexuality with great honesty and frank imagery.

When she and Rivera go to New York, Kahlo avenges Rivera's infidelities by sleeping with one of the same women he had bedded earlier. In a diner after their lovemaking, the woman confesses to Kahlo, "I never thought I'd ever say this but you were so much better than your husband." Later in the film, on a solo visit to Paris, Kahlo ends up in bed for a torrid session of lovemaking with a nightclub chanteuse.

It is this very tortured love life, saddled with the pain of her physical impairments that gives her art work a stunning vivacity and macabre potency. Kahlo, one of the best-known female artists of the last century, produced a stunning array of works, most of them self-portraits, which blended realism and surrealism in fascinating and often dangerous new ways. Every single piece has a stark honesty that floods the

canvass.

Taymor uses these explosive paintings as interludes in her film. Animation is interspersed throughout the film, lending this biopic the same strangeness of realism and surrealism with which Kahlo infused her works.

The film is mostly successful. The act-

ing ensemble is strong. Roger Reese turns in a stunningly subtle and well-modulated performance as Kahlo's doting and supportive father. As Diego Rivera, Alfred Molina (Chocolat) turns in one of the best performances of the year and one of the best of his career. He captures Rivera's struggles with infidelity as well as his undying passion for Kahlo with a moving grace and poignancy. Molina, an actor of sublime range, from perfectly-timed comedy to restrained drama, is simply brilliant in this role.

Hayek, sporting Kahlo's trademark unibrow, has turned in a very brave performance, baring both body and soul to create a compelling portrait of a very unique artist. Her acting is the best it's ever been and she beautifully captures both the inimitable joie de vivre of Kahlo's exuberance as well as the torturous pain of her torrid loves and her failing body.

Reese, Molina and Hayek could very well be rewarded with acting nominations at next year's Oscars and they would all be greatly deserved.

However, Julie Taymor's directing is uneven at best, as was the case with her last cinematic outing in Titus. Taymor, who honed her skills on the stage, seems to be uneasy with the medium of film. She brings her stunning visual sense to the movie, but doesn't quite manage to create a cohesive whole.

There are, however, some mesmerizing moments in the film. The accident which shattered Kahlo's body is recreated with stunning veracity and symbolism. At the end of the crash, Kahlo's mangled body lays in the wreckage, covered in blood and the gold dust carried by a vendor on the bus. That moment of the end of the crash foretells beautifully, in Taymor's cinematic language, the duality of the rest of Kahlo's life, imbued with crippling pain and with dazzling artistic genius. It is moments of sheer genius like this that serve as saving graces Taymor's weaknesses as a director in other parts.

Her death is also creatively captured using Kahlo's paintings of her own demise. Kahlo felt that she had been trapped by the limitations of her body and she wanted to escape the flesh, demanding to be cremated as opposed to being buried. "I have laid down enough throughout my life," she tells Rivera at one point in the film.

The film is a wonderful blend of humor and pathos, a marvelous togetherness of the celebration of life and the tragic limitations of the human heart and body.

Frida is a brave film and well worth watching. Hayek's ten-year odyssey in bringing this film to the screen pays off handsomely. Kahlo's was a life worth dramatizing and this film does justice to one of the most talented and ingenious artists of the contemporary erä.

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