Carla Gutiérrez’ documentary tells Frida Kahlo’s life story in the artist’s own words.
Like all filmmakers who endeavor to document a deceased creative figure, Carla Gutiérrez faced a daunting challenge: how do you bring the artist back to life?
In telling the story of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, born in 1907 and died too young in 1954, Gutiérrez employs the artist’s own words, as recorded in her illustrated diaries.
Kahlo’s life has been dramatized in two films, Frida Still Life (1983), a Mexican drama, and Frida (2002), starring Salma Hayek as the artist. She’s a character in Tim Robbins’ Cradle Will Rock (1999) and makes a cameo animated appearance in Pixar’s Coco (2017). So she’s not entirely unknown to dedicated moviegoers in Dallas, nor to those whose eyes are open to the broader cultural palette that she helped to popularize as a Mexican artist, even if she didn’t gain wider recognition in the art world until the 1970s.
Gutiérrez uses Kahlo’s diaries as the biographical spine of her film, but that’s only a jumping-off point. Employing a rich variety of voice artists, led by Fernanda Echevarría del Rivero as Kahlo, together with archival photos and materials, some of it animated beautifully for the first time, Gutiérrez creates a fascinating collage that touches on every major event in Kahlo’s life, from her childhood in Mexico to the horrific vehicular accident at the age of 18 that left her in a lifetime of pain to her marriage with artist Diego Rivera to their many (separate) relationships with men and women to her development as an acclaimed, pioneering artist.
The film is never less than impressive in its respectful treatment of an important figure in the 20th century, whose influence has rippled down through the decades, manifesting in many different facets of the culture. It’s an essential element of education for anyone with even a passing interest in the arts.
Dallas Film Now. 