FRIDA (Sundance FF 2024) – Review by Leslie Combemale
There’s something powerful about seeing a bio-doc based on the words and images of their subject. Even if the subject is believed to be well-known, their own words either supersede or create new context for all former knowledge. These are their thoughts. These are their images. In director Carla Gutièrrez’s new film Frida, she brings famed artist Frida Kahlo into sharper focus through her letters, essays, interviews, and her illustrated diary. Though many might know the broad strokes of her life, the constant pain from an early accident, her tumultuous relationship with Diego Rivera, and her exquisite, emotional self portraits, there’s more to the know about this exceptional woman and historical figure. In Frida, the audience learns so much more, and nearly all from her own words.
The film, which covers more than 40 years of the artist’s life, uses all the research materials available about Frida Kahlo, much of which had never been released to the general public. What gives the film even more weight is the use of Frida’s art throughout the film, not just as static images, but animated, almost as if to reflect the movement of her mind as she created. Showing her images as the story of her life and challenges unfold gives new context to what are already very powerful images. Although the painting “Henry Ford Hospital”, which features a bloody Frida in a hospital bed, with red cords rising up to an organ, a baby, and a snail left an indelible mark on me when I saw it for the first time, this film reveals some of Frida’s deepest feelings of sadness around her time spent in the hospital after her miscarriage.
Present too, in the film is a consistent undertone of struggle around being a female artist, and beyond that, being a female artist in the shadow of a famous male artist, that speaks to a problem still in force in the art world. Although there’s no question that Diego Rivera had an enormous impact of Frida’s style, she would still have found her voice, with or without him. Perhaps she found her voice in spite of him. Whatever the case, the film’s examination of their complicated relationship, via Frida’s own words, and occasionally the words of close friends, are a fascinating look into artistic partnership, at its best and worst.
The voicing by Fernanda Echaverria del Rivero is spot-on, in that she doesn’t overdramatize her words, but neither does she throw them away. It was no small job, reading the words of a woman, for example, who just lost her child, or who is expressing her hatred of the artifice in the salons and mansions of the American wealthy. Frida was always a woman who spoke freely of her feelings, her sexuality, and her passions, and having them beautifully expressed by the right voice artist is key to making this documentary work.
Gutièrrez has done great work here, not merely as a profile of an artist, but as a profile of a disabled, queer artist who existed at a time when just being a woman should have been enough to keep her from finding her voice. It is a film that should be shown to any and all fledgling or struggling artists, whatever their background. It’s a reminder that art is messy. It’s complicated, just like the people creating it.
For every woman who rebelled, who defied expectation, who walked a line where she was seen as fascinating, a little strange, and not at all what women were supposed to be, this movie is for them.
4 1/2 out of 5 stars.
