VIFF review: Frida Kahlo documentary delves deep into her most intense artworks
Art historians reveal new complexity in some of the famed painter’s best-known works
Portrait of Frida Kahlo
Streams September 24 to October 7 as part of the Vancouver International Film Festival, via VIFF.org
U.K. DIRECTOR ALI Ray takes a deep dive into the Mexican icon’s key works in a conventionally structured documentary about one of history’s most unconventional artists. The biographical elements--the tram crash, Diego Rivera’s infidelity—are by now well known. The film’s big strength is the way it weaves in the art, taking images now ubiquitous on T-shirts, handbags, and keychains and letting experts loose to riff on their multilayered meanings and symbols. So a tormented painting like The Broken Column, with its fractured spine and nails piercing flesh, becomes as much an expression of hope as of physical pain. Meanwhile, Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress is both a “fuck you” to a former lover and a nod to Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus.
Academics delve into works that display magic realism and break taboos like vaginal blood, as well.
Fans of the artist will gain a new appreciation for the complexity, courage, and fierce cultural pride of Kahlo--a woman who, as one expert puts it, “could say through art the unsayable”.
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