Julie Taymor's biopic of the revolutionary Mexican artist Frida Kahlo isn't as eccentric and daring as her stunning take on Shakespeare's "Titus", but is still a subversive and engaging picture, content to let the wild and wondrous tale of Frida's eventful life speak for itself. Crippled in her teenage years in a horrifying bus crash that would leave her in pain for the rest of her days, Frida is here presented as a pioneer free spirit that assumed her unorthodox ideas in the mid-twenties; although coming from a well-off bourgeois family (nearly bankrupted by the constant operations her disjointed body required), she embraced communism early on, painted in a extremely personal faux-naïf style with surrealist overtones while all around her political art was all the rage, enjoyed a healthy bissexuality (a lesbian tango scene is downright smouldering) and found the love of her life in a tempestuous marriage to notorious womanizer and artistic luminary Diego Rivera. Much to Taymor's credit, but also to Salma Hayek and Alfred Molina's passionate performances (why only Hayek was nominated for an Oscar is beyond me), "Frida" not only engages you in this exotic rollercoaster ride that wears its heart proudly in its Latin sleeve, it also gives you a sense of passing time, of opportunities lost, of magic in the making. While Frida was an artist, this isn't a film about her art, but about her life and the way she turned it into her art, gracefully underlined by Taymor's resort to animated interludes where the paintings seem to come to life (through CGI animation or old-fashioned montage or puppetry). That's why it's a shame that the script is so conventionally plotted and that the film's conclusion seems strangely subdued after the celebratory mood of what's come before. But these are minor quibbles, since "Frida" is that rarity of rarities: a biopic with its heart on the right place.
