Frida Presents Kahlo in Her Own Words, but Flinches from Her Cultural and Capitalist Legacy

This July will mark 70 years since the legendary Mexican painter Frida Kahlo passed away, yet it feels like no filmic exploration of the artist to date has adequately grappled with both her complicated life and subsequent legacy. Director Carla Gutiérrez’s debut documentary feature Frida – which already misfires by sharing its title with the famous Julie Taymor-helmed biopic starring Salma Hayek – operates under the conceit of portraying Kahlo “in her own words” via her personal diaries, but by not pushing back against the artist’s tendency to self-mythologize or addressing the pervasiveness of her image as a consumer product, it feels incomplete. While it’s admittedly beguiling to gain access to Kahlo’s innermost thoughts and genuine feelings, her diary has long been available to peruse, making Gutiérrez’s approach safe and somewhat stale.

Though additional research certainly went into the film, Kahlo’s diary serves as its narrative backbone, with archival photographs and moving images used to bolster the artist’s sketches and written entries that chronologically chart her life. Even with this relative wealth of resources, however, Frida feels sabotaged by a lack of historical context. It tells the same reductive story that even novice Kahlo scholars have encountered ad infinitum: That she was an artist tortured by physical turmoil, a sexually insatiable bisexual, her career simultaneously spurred and hindered by the success of her muralist husband Diego Rivera.

These notions might hold kernels of truth, but they are hardly revelatory. Given that Kahlo is known for intentionally skewing key details of her life – namely her age and proximity to indigenous Tehuana culture (regularly dressing in traditional gowns while having few tangible ties to it) – it’s perplexing that Gutiérrez didn’t employ any experts to unravel Kahlo’s fascinating life and cultural footprint, including the fact that her personal history has been muddled by both her own inflated sense of self and posthumous “Fridamania” gone rogue. As a filmmaker who previously edited several docs centering on famous women, including Chavela (2017), RBG (2018) and Julia (2021), it’s similarly interesting that Gutiérrez chose to forgo conventional modes of investigation when exploring Kahlo as a figure.

The most glaring shortcoming of the film’s alleged faithfulness to Kahlo’s autonomous portrayal of herself is that it tampers with the very artworks that she created. Animated elements created by Sofía Inés Cázares and Renata Galindo literally bring the painter’s work to life, adding movement and even removing elements from these images for dramatic effect. While the animations themselves don’t necessarily reflect poorly on the artists who rendered them, it is nonetheless disingenuous to present this film as an authentic account of Kahlo’s personhood while altering her creative output. Art that is as powerful, provocative and worthy of patient study as Kahlo’s doesn’t need to have artificial movement added in order to captivate a viewer. A much more successful supplementary facet of the documentary is actress Fernanda Echevarría del Rivero reading excerpts from Kahlo’s diary, embodying the artist and imbuing each entry with convincing emotional resonance. Successful or not, both of these elements are merely decorative and do little to actually unpack Kahlo’s complexity, both past and present.

For the sake of meeting the film on its level, there is validity in arguing that much of the doc’s narrative, no matter how reductive or uninspired it might seem, is at the very least loyal when it comes to presenting Kahlo’s preoccupations in her quotidian life. Though many might find it tiresome for Frida to largely view her career through the lens of her tumultuous marriage, it’s undeniable that, at least in her diary, Rivera was a primary focus of her waking thoughts. The problem is that, when it comes to other aspects of her life that would never be critically examined through her own diary, there is no curiosity on Gutiérrez’s part. (Was Kahlo a true communist activist or a champagne socialist? How did her embracing of “la raza cósmica” feed into her own racism? How did her appropriation of Indigenous cultures fuel national stereotypes?)

It seems like a filmmaker fascinated by Kahlo’s creative impact would want to ask bigger questions—not only as it pertains to Kahlo’s ideological stances during her life, but also how her visage and art has been co-opted by capitalism since her death. Frida explores her communist values and how they shaped her identity without contextualizing or reconciling the cultural phenomenon of her image being sold ubiquitously—right down to her biographical documentary landing on a streaming service owned by an institution rife with labor issues. In the end, hearing a story straight from the subject isn’t always sufficient, especially when the current state of her image is one that the artist would likely find grossly unsavory, no matter how flawed her own politics may have been.

Director: Carla Gutiérrez
Release Date: March 14, 2024

Natalia Keogan is a freelance writer and editor with a concerted focus on independent film. Her interviews and criticism have appeared in Filmmaker Magazine, Reverse Shot, Backstage Magazine, SlashFilm, Blood Knife and Daily Grindhouse, among others. She lives in Queens, New York with her large orange cat. Find her on Twitter @nataliakeogan