Emmy-nominated editor Carla Gutiérrez, who cut the Oscar-nominated films RBG and La Corona, as well as the LGBTQ+ documentary Pray Away, makes her directorial debut with the exquisite Frida, which premiered in the US Documentary Competition at Sundance, and went on to win the festival’s Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award.
The film’s beautifully expressive animated opening credits sequence, by Sofía Inés Cázares and Renata Galindo, is a work of art in itself. Gutiérrez then immerses into the life of one of the world’s most iconic artists, Frida Kahlo. Rather than looking back from today through the eyes of art critics and cultural commentators, Gutiérrez instead centres Kahlo’s own words. Insightful quotes, taken from an array of first-person sources, including private letters, her illustrated diary, print interviews, and essays, are passionately voiced by actress Fernanda Echevarría del Rivero. It is an inspired approach, that essentially makes Kahlo a co-author of the film, and powerfully evokes the artist’s inner-life, accompanied by a tapestry of beautifully restored archive film footage and photographs, both in black and white and vibrant colour, and Cázares and Galindo’s stunning animated sequences.
Through Kahlo’s words, Gutiérrez paints an image of a bright, relentlessly inquisitive child, with a religious mother and atheist father, who was enthralled by the colours of Coyoacán, on the outskirts of Mexico City. The artist’s formative years are succinctly contextualized, as she developed an affinity with the oppressed early in her life in an era of revolution. With ambitions of studying medicine, Kahlo enrolled in prep school in the early 1920s, and although she was meant to study separately with the girls, she describes skipping those classes to study alongside the young men. She was only the woman in the “Cachuchas” social group of her schoolmates, which included her boyfriend, Alejandro Gomez Arias. In crisply restored images, a young Kahlo can be seen standing out from the crowd, dressed in the traditionally masculine attire of a three-piece suit and tie, with her hair slicked back.
Arias was with Kahlo in a near-fatal bus accident in 1925—viscerally depicted by Gutiérrez, aided by vividly atmospheric sound design by María Alejandra Rojas—which left her severely injured. It was an incident that would have lasting consequences, with her writing expressing how the pain she was in fundamentally altered her perception of the world. It also demonstrated her perseverance. Confined to a hospital bed during her long recovery, with the help of her mother she found a practical way to paint despite her limited mobility, creating portraits of her close friends so that they wouldn’t forget her. “The spirit of the revolution was the foundation for my determination”, Kahlo says, as Gutiérrez places her work alongside other Mexican artists of the revolution, like David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco, and her future husband Diego Rivera.
Her first trip to the United States in 1931 saw her accompanying Rivera for his solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York and then on to Detroit, where he was enthralled and inspired by its industry, while Kahlo felt increasingly isolated. This section of the film is one of its most involving, with Gutiérrez presenting Kahlo’s fascinating, unvarnished impressions of the US. Kahlo expresses disillusionment with much of what she witnesses, such as the disparity between the wealthy and destitute; as well as her boredom with New York’s social elite, who were impressed by the novelty of her Mexican fashion; her depression during the snowfalls of winter; and her excitement at the vibrancy of some of the city’s neighbourhoods such as Harlem and Chinatown.
While they were living in the US, a newspaper headline from The Detroit News in 1932 acknowledges Kahlo’s own work, while inadvertently indicating the misogyny of the media, the art world, and the times: “Wife of the Master Mural Painter Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art”. In the body of that interview though, Kahlo was not afraid to put herself forward, displaying assertiveness in a typically playful way, quoted as saying, “It is I who am the big artist”, when comparing herself to her “little boy” of a husband. Kahlo’s ability to maintain a sense of humour—despite the pain, early frustrated ambition, and self-doubt—runs throughout the film, with her friend, American artist Lucile Blanch, highlighting it when describing her as “a firework of wit”.
The years of living in Rivera’s shadow in the US are later contrasted with her thrill at emerging as an independent artist, receiving her first commission, and eventually returning to New York in 1938 for her own solo exhibition. That show was arranged by artist André Breton, who was taken by the power of Kahlo’s work, believing that it stood up to that by other more celebrated European surrealists, describing it as “a ribbon around a bomb”.
A solo exhibition in Paris the following year saw Kahlo earn praise from the likes of Picasso and Kandinsky, but she was unimpressed by her experience there, the city’s art scene, and what she saw as the triviality of its café culture, that was more about philosophizing than taking action. Despite this international recognition, it was not until her health was in severe decline that she received her first solo exhibition in Mexico in 1953, the year before her death at the age of 47.
Gutiérrez never simply lists significant episodes in Kahlo’s life, but always explores both how they made her feel and influenced her art, such as the impact of the emotional pain of her first miscarriage and the increasing physical pain as a result of the bus accident. Continually engaging, the film captures Kahlo’s spirit as an artist, her creative process as she forged her own distinctive style, the unavoidable urge that she felt to express herself through art and profound sense of “completion” that it gave her. Through the words that Gutiérrez selects, Kahlo’s voice comes across as raw and immediate, it is characterful and coarse at times, with liberal use of swearing. Along with the despair, there is beauty and passion in her words.
Her writing captures her sexual liberation and her feelings about her open marriage with Rivera, admitting that his affairs with other women made her jealous and insecure, while she also saw other men and women, observing that for her, “an affair last as long as it gives pleasure”. In archive film footage, we see her intimate with a woman, and in her letters she expresses her affection for fellow artists such as Georgia O’Keeffe and Jacqueline Lamba, to whom she writes: “I have not forgotten you. The nights are long and punishing.” Gutiérrez incorporates Kahlo’s relationships with women into the film as casually as Kahlo seems to in her writing, and it is only Rivera who labels her when he quoted as saying that he knows that she is “homosexual”. He admits that he is more accepting and less jealous of her affairs with women than he is with other men.
There’s real fire in Echevarría del Rivero’s captivating delivery, juxtaposed with Cázares and Galindo’s evocative animation that delicately and intentionally brings Kahlo’s work to life by highlighting certain elements that help to draw us in to its intense emotions and vibrant colours. In just 88-minutes, Gutiérrez crafts an exhilarating journey through Kahlo’s inner life, tracking her development as an artist and her most intimate reflections.
Like any great documentary about an artist, Frida left me eager to reconnect with the artist’s work itself, having gained a fresh perspective on it and renewed appreciation for it. As for Kahlo’s legacy, Gutiérrez briefly encapsulates the ubiquity of the artist’s continuing presence in our lives through retrospectives, murals, and merchandise. But the last word is left to Kahlo’s own prediction, delivered with typical humour: “I believe that after my death I am going to be the biggest piece of caca in the world”.
By James Kleinmann
Frida world premiered in the US Documentary Competition on the opening day of the 40th Sundance Film Festival and won Sundance’s Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award.