Wow! Such a good movie.

Expected more

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

This movie evokes David Lean's "Lawrence Of Arabia" in a sense, that both movies were not intended to be straight biographies of their respective historical figures. In fact, this movie even made me think of the "I Love Lucy" sitcom, with Diego Rivera as the buffoon to Frida Kahlo the straight woman.The movie starts with Frida Kahlo at age 18, just before she had the accident while riding a bus, which would cause her crippling injuries she would carry for the remainder of her life. She is given a canvas and paints by her family to occupy her while she initially recovers, and she adopts a surrealistic style, and later meets and marries already famous muralist Diego Rivera. They become left-wing radicals while living in high society, move to the United States where Rivera would try to paint his mural depicting Lenin in the Rockefeller Center, then move back when the project is cancelled and the mural destroyed. Both spouses have many extramarital affairs, though Diego gets upset when his wife has one with Leon Trotsky. (I saw the movie in the theater, and the audience all groaned in mockery when Diego complained to Frida about it.)Like I said, the movie is drama rather than biography; we see Frida, despite her sufferings, as strong and laughing at her many troubles. We don't see what moves her politically or artistically, but the movie is for entertainment and not education.

for story. for status of homage to a great Mexican artist. for Salma Hayek. or for Alfred Molina. for the large territories behind the dialogs. for the spirit of Frida Kahlo who seems be , in few scenes, more than realistic. for the delicate poetry of image. for the slices from a period looking best form of expression for freedom. for colors, sounds, pain's shadows, search of happiness, crumbs of madness and for music. a film who is not a revelation. or trip in past. but a large map for dreams who are hidden in each of us. because it has the science to reflect, with grace, the complex life of a woman who has courage to be herself ignoring the price of her gestures. a film about different sides of the love.

Frida is a bio-pic about the surrealist Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. The film details her early artistic aspirations and the way she met her husband, the famous painter Diego Rivera. We also witness the horrific accident that left Frida in pain for the rest of her life, and her development as a master artist while living in the shadow of her husband's fame. The film is uniquely stylized, literally bringing her paintings to life on screen, allowing the audience to connect the narrative to the artwork. But the greatest thing about Frida is the way it handles the politics involved, both in terms of social relationships, as well as treating Kahlo and Rivera's communist views with dignity and respect. The film doesn't celebrate their art while condemning their radical politics, as it easily could have in the wrong hands. Rather, it's a celebration of the relationship between the two. Frida is ultimately a film about how politics informs and flows through art. Salma Hayek gives a career defining performance as the radical painter, and Julie Taymor directs this wonderful film with a vision that takes the story to great heights.

Frida's life was a soap opera, and seemingly tailor-made for a film, but the tiny budget and mediocre performances don't do justice for such a brilliant artist. The lethargic pacing and frustrating sense of unexplored avenues gives the viewer the sense of an unfinished film. Salma Hayek is suitable in the main role, but she lacks the finesse and stage presence to portray such an iconic figure. Alfred Molina, normally a brilliant, chameleonic actor who vanishes into whatever role he plays, seems strangely inert. Even Geoffrey Rush as Trotsky isn't that great.This claustrophobic film is mostly confined to the interiors of houses or studios, except for a hike up an Aztek pyramid and the famous bus accident that gave Frida lifelong pain. Even the trip to New York is a cheap, unsatisfying pastiche of flat graphics that any high school film studio could put together. One gets the impression that if they threw twenty million more at this film, it would have been as visually stunning as the artist's paintings themselves, which by the way aren't featured as prominently as you might expect.I guess I was expecting the film equivalent of Frida's magical surrealism, but what came across instead was a paint-by-numbers drama force-fitting famous lines everyone knows, such as the mother's lament that Frida's marriage to Diego was like a dove marrying an elephant.