Frida

A film by Julie Taymor

The story of an exceptional woman who lived an unforgettable life. Frida Kahlo, born in Mexico in 1907, endured a life of crippling pain caused by a road accident in her youth, yet her innate energy, passion and love of life, as well as her enormous abilities as a painter, allowed her to overcome this daunting obstacle to achieve fame and recognition. From humble beginnings, Frida Kahlo is a talented artist with a unique vision, and from her enduring relationship with her mentor and husband, Diego Rivera, to her scandalous affairs, Frida's uncompromising personality inspires her greatest creations. She is an artist in every sense of the word – taking and owning all that life gives her and transforming it into unflinching portraits of her soul.

Frida, in many ways, prides herself on her independent, fiery nature, yet when Rivera becomes a part of her life, she quickly succumbs to his seductive charms. She marries him even though she knows he is constitutionally incapable of remaining faithful to her. She accepts this in the knowledge of what lies ahead for her since she is incapable of living without him. That the relationship is one of utter co-dependency is demonstrated by the fact that Rivera, even after their numerous breakups, keeps coming back to his one true love.

But we see also, and empathise with, the hypocrisy inherent in her own romantic dalliances, principally her bisexual flings with other women and even the affair she conducts with Trotsky himself during the period of his exile in Mexico, just before his assassination. Frida is a woman who experiences so many tragic things in life yet she never gives up, she in fact grows stronger, helped through hard times by her wit, her dignity and her love for life and art.

Between 1926, when she made her first self-portrait, and her death in 1954, Frida produced around 200 images. Certainly the biographical details of her remarkable life inflect many aspects of her work, yet her depiction of her body and experiences can also be seen as a response to wider cultural and political debates. For all their apparent naivety, her works frequently reveal an incendiary subtext, whether they are questioning power relationships between developed and developing nations, testing the role of women within a patriarchal society, or attempting to reconcile the global histories and religions of East and West.

Frida Kahlo's unique talent was to make her one of the century's most enduring artists. She is variously enshrined in the popular imagination as a bohemian artist, a victim turned survivor, proto-feminist, sexual adventurer who challenged gender boundaries, and, with her mixed-race parentage, an embodiment of a hybrid, postcolonial world.

Adapted from the biography by Hayden Herrera, the film is a marvellous tribute to a truly unique and remarkable woman, and one of the greatest female artists of the 20th century.