Belated contribution to Fridamania. The same-named 1984 film by Paul Leduc, while timelier, was too low-profile to discourage additional spotlight-seekers and altar-worshippers. So now we have a new chiselled Frida Kahlo (Salma Hayek), an almost Manneristically elongated one, to grace the cover of the paperback reprint of Hayden Herrera's definitive biography, and to obstruct our view of the real woman. The movie unmistakably works a kind of magic (not to say "magic realism") in the transformation of so fascinating a life, so lavishly re-created and so lusciously photographed, into something so dull and ordinary. Certainly we might have expected some visual pyrotechnics from director Julie Taymor, who had shaken up Shakespeare in Titus. And for sure, Taymor pulls out all the stops for the grisly trolley accident that crippled the artist in her youth (though she's dancing a tango before you know it). And her voyage to New York -- otherwise known as the Invasion of Gringolandia -- will be done as an animated collage of paper cutouts, with her muralist husband, Diego Rivera, scaling the Empire State Building as King Kong. For the rest, this is a surprisingly pedestrian "biopic," in the subgenre of Tormented Artist, endlessly relating the marital infidelities and blow-ups ("My goddam sister! You're an animal!"), and casting only passing glances at the oh-by-the-way paintings. Taymor, in effect, is like the socialite who attends a gallery opening only in order to gossip about the artist, and who can barely spare a moment for what's on the walls. The artwork is important to her, just as Kahlo's circle of friends is important to her, only to the extent that it confers a reputation. The movie counts on the cachet of the characters to compensate for the triteness and repetitiveness of the incidents. With Alfred Molina, Geoffrey Rush, Ashley Judd, Antonio Banderas, and Edward Norton, as Diego Rivera, Leon Trotsky, Tina Modotti, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Nelson Rockefeller, in order. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd
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