A role to die for

10 April 2012

A woman lies in bed in a New York hospital. She groans with pain. The miscarriage has been raw and bloody. But she is obsessively sketching the object at the foot of the bed. It is a foetus in a surgical bottle - her own unborn son. It's the key image of the film that opened the 59th Venice Film Festival with its Mexican-American star, Salma Hayek. She plays Frida Kahlo, artist, fellow communist, bed friend and sometimes faithful wife to the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera in the prewar decades when working-class socialism was potent (and fashionable) in Latin America.

Rivera put his politics on the walls of public buildings. Frida pulled hers out of her innards and all the bodily pain of an accident-prone life in which, as she drily commented, the biggest accident was her marriage to Rivera.

This is the sort of role that an actress like Hayek will kill for - and she looks capable of it - or dedicate decades to producing and starring in the movie. She got an ovation at Venice. Deservedly so. She is Frida in life - and death. With hair as glossy as a crow's wing, and as black, and her own eyebrows thickened into Frida's famous ones that sat like fingers crossed against bad luck above features as sharp as a hatchet, Hayek evokes a temperament as hot as red peppers.

Frida thrives on affronting convention. A beautiful girl at a party thrown by the radical-chic set cries: "A dance with me for the person who drinks most tequila." The men down their glasses in gulps. Frida drains the bottle in one go, then claims her prize in a bisexual tango that sets the room abuzz.

Directed by another woman, Julie Taymor, who staged The Lion King on Broadway and made a meal of the red meat of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus on the screen, Frida animates the pain and suffering of the artist's painted iconography and locates its origins in the impetuous but indomitable trajectory of a life of personal suffering and posthumous fulfilment.

The film's images are often shocking. A streetcar accident cripples young Frida, leaving her lying like part of the wrecked vehicle while gold dust she'd been holding, intended for a church mural, powders her horribly broken body like a benison. Such surrealist touches infuse the film and turn a genre, not notable for its intelligence or imagination, into a living chronicle of autobiographical art.

On the operating table, Frida hallucinates her surgeons into the skeletons of the ritualistic Mexican Dance of Death. When she and Rivera, her compulsively promiscuous husband (played with great generosity like a lumbering, but caring, pachyderm by Alfred Molina), make a triumphal entry into New York society in 1930, the cinema screen turns into a living Constructivist mural, a montage of events and celebrities. Frida visualises her paunchy, raunchy husband as a King Kong scaling the skyscrapers and holding half-willing, half-fearful women in the palm of his hand like that hairy ape.

The couple are passionate friends, rather than marital partners: when Frida catches Rivera sketching his nude mistress, she glances at the woman's painted breasts and decrees, "Tits like gravity". And cowed by her curt candour, he turns the proud flesh pendulous. Frida, in turn, becomes the lover of Leon Trotsky, played by Geoffrey Rush, fleeing to Mexico from Stalin's assassins.

Like most biopics of famous people, the film suffers to some degree from the fact that its protagonists seem to have next to no small talk, but are always discussing the great events of their own lives or times. The attempt to introduce intimacy into the meeting of celebrities - "Leon, tell me about your children," says Frida, cuddling up to Trotsky's goatee - invites easy mockery.

But these are minor imperfections in a hugely imaginative undertaking whose forward momentum is continuously sustained by Hayek's wrenching performance, even when crippled and corseted in hoops of steel or being borne, bejewelled, turbaned and still bed-ridden, into her own art show for the last great exhibition of her work.

While Rivera's murals have suffered-from time's decay and the outworn Marxist creed of heroic workers that they incarnated, Frida Kahlo's art has steadily increased in importance and value as its record of personal suffering and triumphant survival becomes a gender symbol as well as a story of a particular woman's personal, artistic and political Gethsemane in the garden of pain. Without condescension or borrowed glory, the film takes Salma Hayek into those ranks, too.

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