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Film Review
| Frida. Directed by Julie Taymor; produced by Sarah Green, Salma Hayek, Jay Polstein, Lizz Speed, Nancy Hardin, Lindsay Flickinger, and Roberto Sneider; written by Claney Sigal, Diane Lake, Gregory Nava, and Anna Thomas. 2002; color; 122 minutes. Distributed by Miramax.Frida, naturaleza viva. Directed by Paul Leduc; produced by Manuel Barbachano Ponce; written by Paul Leduc and Juan Joaquín Blanco. 1984; color; 107 minutes. Mexico. Spanish with English subtitles. Distributed by Clasa Films Mundiales.
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| About twenty minutes into director Julie Taymor's film, its eponymous protagonist, Frida Kahlo (Salma Hayek), completes a portrait of her younger sister, Cristina (Mia Maestro), and declares: "Now you look like a gringa movie star!" This self-referential sentence—about relations between high culture and mass culture, national and transnational celebrity, Mexico and the United States—gets at the heart of the contemporary history that surrounds this Hollywood biopic about a "Mexican" luminary and international icon played by an actor who draws crucial cultural capital simultaneously from her Mexican and Hollywood identities. |
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Frida punctuates the two-decade international ascension of Kahlo's image as Mexican metonym and ideological palimpsest. The start of the process can be marked in Mexico by a similarly eponymous but audiovisually very different cinematic intervention, director Paul Leduc's Frida, naturaleza viva (1984), and in the United States by Hayden Herrera's biography Frida (1983). In this period, Kahlo (1907–1954) superceded Diego Rivera (1886–1957), twice her husband, as the personification of twentieth-century Mexican culture, and now the Miramax movie replaces the HarperCollins book on which it claims to be based as the dominant English-language representation of the Mexican artist. The 2002 reissue of Herrera's biography completes the Taymor film's work of Hollywoodizing Kahlo's iconography; its new front cover replaces its earlier one's reproduction of Kahlo's Self-Portrait with Monkey (1940) with a photograph of Hayek as Kahlo. And, as the back cover announces, it is only one of three Herrera-authored "official tie-ins" to Miramax's movie. Hence, U.S. scholarship and culture industries align themselves as Kahlo's filmic figure moves from Spanish to English, Mexico to the United States, unconventional to conventional cinema. Herrera and HarperCollins gain publicity through their book's association with the film, and Taymor and Miramax gain a sign of scholarly credibility critical to their marketing of film as history. In the process, screen and book jacket together exploit and transform Kahlo into Frida. |
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Frida's marketing trumpets its connections to Herrera's scholarship, but it does not cite the Mexican film it essentially remakes. Taymor's choice of events and actual scenes are strikingly derivative of Leduc's. A few, but by far not the only possible, cinematic quotations are its opening scene of a bed-bound Kahlo, late in life, being frantically transported from her famous blue house (today's Museo Frida Kahlo) in Coyoacán to central Mexico City to attend the opening of her first solo exhibition in Mexico; its depiction of Kahlo witnessing her husband's seduction of her sister in his San Angel studio; its representation (really nonrepresentation) of Kahlo and Rivera's political divorce from their Stalinist colleague David Siqueiros; and the couple's complex personal relations with the exiled Leon Trotsky. |
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