Carla Gutierrez’s documentary film might not be the perfect primer for the life of Frida Kahlo, but its highly imaginative, ruminative take makes for a perfect mood-piece
“I paint myself because I am what I know best,” says Frida Kahlo in Carla Gutierrez’s latest documentary Frida, currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video. What we hear is the voice of Fernanda Echevarría, the narrator who, much like in the rest of the film, beautifully embodies the late Mexican painter’s spirit and lends it a tender, humane touch. Gutierrez and Echevarría draw upon a vast trove of Kahlo’s writings, letters and words from her illustrated diary to enable something quite amazing: to let the maverick artist guide us through her topsy-turvy life in her own words.
The line quoted above is only a sample of what this 87-minute-long narrative attempts to do, as it delves deep into the annals of Frida Kahlo’s mind. It pulls out myriad crucial moments from Kahlo’s life of 47 years and addresses them in a manner she would have preferred quite well — with honesty, care and no ambiguity whatsoever.
Through Victor Hernández Stumpfhauser’s enlivening score and a succinct interplay of archival photographs and footage and animation, Gutierrez manages to offer a great peek into the soul of Frida Kahlo. As her words set the context and the mood, the animated versions of her many paintings capture the Mexican mores of her being. Consequently, Frida places Kahlo’s art on the pedestal it deserves and later lets the artist herself quash all the predispositions surrounding it. In other words, the film demystifies Frida Kahlo through her own words and her own art.
Not One To Mince Words
Take, for instance, her views on being dubbed a surrealist by André Breton, the French writer/poet who led the Surrealism movement. At first, Kahlo is part surprised and part charmed with the tag because she says she never painted dreams but only her reality. But upon reaching Paris for an exhibit, she realizes the reality is farthest from what she had imagined her trip would be like. She infers an air of condescension around her, and when Breton doesn’t live up to his end of the deal, she is further infuriated.
Kahlo receives great praise from the masters of the game such as Joan Miro, Kandinsky and Picasso, mind you, but that doesn’t suffice to impress her. Instead, she leaves the city with a disparaging note for ‘fellow’ Surrealists, whose vapid lives she says made her ‘want to vomit’ and whose work she carefully terms as ‘a decadent manifestation of bourgeois art’!
Frida Kahlo was equally fierce and free-spirited in her amorous life. “Like a fairytale princess,” declares Andre Breton as his first words of choice for Kahlo and we gather that all of Kahlo’s romantic adventures — both men and women — outside her marriage were similarly besotted by her. She loved and adored them back with the same intensity but not without the caveat that before anything, she needed to be sexually attracted to them. The film even quotes her saying that her simple view of life is to “make love, take a bath... and make love again.”
Painting To Preserve Her Love, Her Self
But these not-so-gentle reflections occur largely as ancillaries in Frida because director Gutierrez often redirects her gaze to the Kahlo’s marriage story. Her marriage with Rivera occupies a large chunk of her life and Gutierrez deftly navigates this portion. She reveals just how important Frida Kahlo’s husband was to her and just how important painting would become to her as their marriage wilted. She reveals art was Kahlo’s most trusted lover and she often went back to the solace of her brush strokes when life rendered her down-and-out. Painting herself and her heart out was perhaps the only way Frida Kahlo preserved herself and her sanity.
Freedom, thereby, becomes an operative word here. Despite her fierce love for living and soaking up its every detail, Frida Kahlo is forced to endure chronic pain her entire adult life. After a near-fatal bus accident at the age of 18 pierces a rod through her body, Kahlo battles lifelong physical pain and medical concerns. The pain has a debilitating impact on the way she functions and approaches life, even causing her on multiple occasions to surrender the much-desired opportunity of motherhood. Frida inspects this aspect quite closely and announces that painting, once again, is what set her free — at least, momentarily.
Perhaps that is why every Frida Kahlo painting captures pain and agony with vividness and so idiosyncratically. Each of them places her in close contact with nature which tends to reflect just how fragile she is feeling at that moment, and the vibrancy of the colours is utilized as a tool to further highlight her fantasy-like gaze. What they also capture beautifully is her intelligence, which came through in her real life as gay abandon, as deep melancholia or even as razor-sharp wit and humour. “It is possible that after my death I am going to be the biggest piece of caca in this world,” she once said, pre-empting her superabundant presence in pop art.
The only grievance with Frida though is that it gets trapped in its own coolness and goes a tad overboard with its ruminations. That is to say that it restricts itself to broad strokes and relays information that is already largely accessible in the public domain, thus overlooking a few unexplored parts of her personal life — her commitment to the Revolution, for instance, is awarded a slightly flimsy retelling. That said, Carlo Gutierrez weaves a compelling tale that is funny, witty, imaginative and above all, compassionate of an artist, who possibly felt that her purpose with life was unfinished at the time of her death. Frida might not be a comprehensive take on its subject’s life but it is fully aware and in sync with its energy. And the result is a mood-piece that feels like a charming tête-à-tête with the icon.
