The life of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo is a story that has been told many, many times. Since she began to be rediscovered in the 1980s, there have been hundreds of books written about her, as well as several feature films telling her story from various angles. And then there are the art exhibitions – dozens since 2020 alone.
Kahlo’s story has been so well-documented and so thoroughly disseminated that one wonders if it is even possible still to find a new angle on the artist. This is the sizable task that the longtime film editor and first-time director Carla Gutiérrez sets for herself in her new movie on the artist, simply titled Frida.
Gutiérrez’s attempts to make Kahlo’s story feel fresh are twofold: she has meticulously combed through the artist’s journals and other writings to let Kahlo tell her own story in her own words. Kahlo herself thus becomes the film’s primary narrative voice (in Fernanda Echevarría del Rivero’s affecting delivery). Kahlo’s world also becomes Frida’s primary visual reference point, Frida also makes rich use of archival footage from the period and from the life of Kahlo herself – much of it quite intimate and candid, it shows a much more personal and various side of the iconic artist.
In her second innovation, Gutiérrez makes the bold choice to bring animation to many of Kahlo’s paintings, letting them become a sort of set of ensemble actors in their own right. She shared that this was a choice she took with some trepidation. “It’s a hard decision to make when you’re dealing with an artist of Frida’s caliber, and how people feel about her,” Gutiérrez said. “It’s like dealing with a story like Star Wars that has so many fans.”
Gutiérrez’s animations act as relatively minor, yet meaningful, interventions into the Mexican artist’s work, along the lines of setting an insect buzzing, adding a pulse of movement to a canvas, bumping up the saturation, or even just slowly zooming in to a meaningful detail. For instance, on Kahlo’s painting The Broken Column, which depicts the artist’s ruined spine as a Greek column with innumerable cracks in it, Gutiérrez has intervened in two ways: she makes the column even more disjointed than in the original, and she sets it crumbling before our eyes. At other times, art is overlaid on images of Kahlo herself, striking personal connections between her life and her work. “We never added any outside elements,” said Gutiérrez. “We wanted to add emotion, but we never wanted to transform their meaning.”
Overall, the effect of the animation is to enhance what the paintings have to say, drawing the eye to the emotional resonance of certain details and building up sets of interconnections between the art and Kahlo’s life. “Being able to put Frida and her art together in the film gave me a stronger sense of how her internal world that you see in the paintings is connected to moments in her life,” Gutiérrez said.
Drawing out these connections, the slow pacing that the film takes with the art invites viewers to linger, perhaps examining elements more closely and forging their own new relationship with the work. Gutiérrez said her goal with the animations was in part to replicate her own experience of taking her time with Kahlo’s artwork. “There are works that I stay with for a long time, exploring in a lot of detail,” she said. “I asked myself how to bring that experience to the viewers. For me, animation was the answer, to guide viewers through the emotional narrative and emotional thread of a painting. Frida’s paintings tend to carry so much information and so much emotional content.”
In letting Kahlo tell her own story in her own words, Gutiérrez felt that she was bringing her down from the iconic Frida whose ocular gaze looks out from innumerable consumer items, from coffee mugs to tote bags. “I was able to get really close to the texture of her personality,” she told me. “Through this process, I got to really hear from her, connect to her voice.” This is one of the refreshing things about Frida. The narrative voice that Gutiérrez has reconstructed from her papers is one that comes across as multiple and varied. At times, Kahlo’s loneliness and vulnerability is palpable, as when she laments how little time she gets with her husband, Diego Rivera, while the pair live in the US, as he is always either painting or pursuing his multiple affairs. “Hearing her talk about her own fragility, that brings her out of this iconic place,” said Gutiérrez. “She was a messy woman, a woman who needed a lot of attention.”
At other times Kahlo’s voice is coy and seductive, as when she is beginning her famed affair with the Soviet dissident Leon Trotsky (in addition to his assistant) – she declares, “it’s good to have sex, even if one is not in love.” These versions of Kahlo are joined by others, like the defiant questioner of gender norms, a curious Kahlo who explores her sexuality, and a candid Kahlo laughing shyly while sketching outdoors. And of course, through it all her words are also often pleasingly sharp. “I really enjoyed hearing her sharp tongue,” laughed Gutiérrez.
The Kahlo here is decidedly earthy and acidic, conversant in irony, vivacious in her appetites, yet also a very sensitive being who clung to art as a means for processing the struggles of a very painful life. It is less a portrait of Kahlo traveling on a certain arc or meeting any particular destiny than it is a collection of memories that, put together, composites out a life for her. This helps Frida to present the air of authenticity that surrounds Kahlo, undoubtedly one of the major underpinnings of her global fanbase. “She was incredibly honest,” said Gutiérrez. “She gave importance to her own emotions and inner world, she made the mundane feelings for women palpable. She made those things important. That’s why she resonates so widely.”
Gutiérrez shared that, for her, venturing into directing was both a nerve-racking process as well as a breath of fresh air. “I was really nervous about my decision to both direct and edit, but I think it worked very well,” she said. She hinted that there were more projects in the works, and that she hopes to manage both direction and editing duties in the future as well. And as to Kahlo? This one’s a love letter to the legions of fans worldwide. “It’s really special to know that it’s getting a global release because she’s so loved everywhere,” she told me. “To be able to reach the art-lovers everywhere – what a gift, right?”
Frida is available on Amazon Prime on 14 March
