‘Frida’: Sundance Review

Dir: Carla Gutierrez. US/Mexico. 2024. 88 mins

This vibrant portrait of Frida Kahlo is chiefly created using her own words, along with those of people who knew her. Carla Gutierrez puts her documentary editing career on the likes of RBG and Julia to good use in her directorial debut, assembling her first-person voiceover (with Fernanda Echevarria Del Rivero as Kahlo) from the artist’s letters, interviews and diaries into a chronological account. This approach lends the film an appropriate immediacy, given how much of Kahlo’s work features her own image resolutely staring at us from the canvas.

Gutierrez lets Kahlo tell her own story, enhanced by animation of her works 

Frida should have no problem finding an audience when it comes to Amazon Prime on March 15 following its world premiere in the US Documentary Competition at Sundance. The Mexican painter, who was brought to the screen in Salma Hayek’s 2002 passion project of the same name, has had an enduring legacy since her death in 1954 – not just because of her work but her eventful life, and the way that she fused the two. Gutierrez’s documentary uses animations of Kahlo’s art as an illustrative backdrop but the focus is on the artist herself. As Kahlo puts it: “I paint because I need it”. 

Archive photographs of Kahlo, along with film from the period, form much of the backdrop as we hear about the artist as a young woman, during which time she dressed in suits and became the only female member of a rebellious group known as Los Cachuchas. Their main delight seemed to be causing anarchic mayhem including, rather disturbingly, tying fireworks to a dog.

In a nod to Kahlo’s use of colour, Gutierrez allows splashes of it to bloom in the archive footage, colourising violins or other minor elements of the frame in vital hues. Elsewhere sound effects are subtly employed, so that we hear a gentle hubbub in galleries or the strike of a match as Kahlo lights a cigarette. Things changed dramatically, however, with a horrendous trolley bus crash in 1925, which saw the 18-year-old Kahlo injured by a large metal rod which left her with lasting injuries and pain. 

Gutierrez lets Kahlo tell her own story, enhanced by animation of her works by creative director Sofia Ines Cazares Lira and art director Renata Galindo Prieto. The animation is often understated – present, for example, in the slight movement of earrings or an insect – but it also allows elements of Kahlo’s work to blossom on the canvas, including plumes of blood or the unfurling of plantlife. 

Kahlo’s relationship with fellow Mexican artist Diego Rivera is also a key element. Gutierrez cleverly creates a sort of dialogue between the two of them (with Rivera voiced by Jorge Richards) as their writings offer differing perspectives on significant moments, including when they met, an encounter that, in retrospect, ripples with the crackle of their attraction. The film also fleshes out the tensions that arose as Kahlo travelled with him to America, where his sexual dalliances and her desire to move back home led to problems. 

Although there is a lot to take in, not least because the voice-over is presented in Kahlo’s native Spanish with subtitles, Guitierrez moves at an impressive pace, finding economic ways to indicate Kahlo also had no shortage of lovers. The various accounts flow from one to another with a similar ease to the blooms of animation so that a more detailed picture emerges. And Kahlo herself proves an enjoyably matter-of-fact guide, noting Diego was “the big shit” in America, while taking no prisoners in her various assessments of what she viewed as the bourgeois unpleasantness of the surrealists. Frida is not just a broad brush affair; the artist is noticeably present.