Revolutionary Rants

Last night Chris and I sat down and watched a film together - a rare experience at this stage in our lives! It was one of my latest ‘3 for £3′ acquisitions from Blockbuster videos in Mansfield (I also got a video of 60 minutes worth of ‘Bertha’, a wonderful animation which I have not seen for many a year! Hooray!), the biographical film ‘Frida’, about the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo.

It was an interesting, but rather dislocated film, I thought. Salma Hayek and Alfred Molina were both on their usual good form, and the shooting of the film around Kahlo’s art was good, but there seemed to be almost gaps missing in the final cut of the film.

We saw the bus crash which crippled Kahlo, including a rather graphic depiction of the poll which pierced her vagina (which is why some say she is a feminist icon, along with, perhaps, her refusal to remove her mono-brow?!), and some scenes afterwards showed the pain that she suffered, but from then on there were only passing references to the pain/30 plus operations she had; an issue which utterly haunts her work as much as her other great theme: Mexico. The film centred on her life with her husband, Diego Rivera, although her art is almost exclusively about herself, her identity and the failure of her body. Strange. I also thought there could have been more colour, which was also an important part of Kahlo’s painting. Geoffrey Rush was also terrible as Trotsky; he looked nothing like him! Other than this, the film was interesting and moved well, but you always felt something was missing, you never got the whole picture.

Worth a watch though, if you have two hours to kill (and a lot cheaper than going to Kahlo exhibition at the Tate Modern, Chicken and I wanted to go, but it was £10 each!!!).