Re: FRIDA KAHLO AND DIEGO RIVERA

["Jurriaan Bendien" <bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The things that struck me in particular about the movie were:

1) the heavy emphasis on the eroticism in Kahlo's relationships, at the
expense of other aspects of her personality, for example, her political
insight, her experience of love, her spiritual sense etc., in an atmosphere
of what often seemed like florisant decadence.

2) the sense in which the "tragic" aspect of Kahlo's life is represented in
terms of her deviation from an allegedly "correct", "more intelligent""or
"superior" model of sexual development, so that Kahlo ultimately appears as
a kind of martyr.
3) the tacit suggestion that Kahlo's art could be explained by, or in terms
of, her deviant bisexuality and.or sexual behaviour/impulses in a rather
reductionist way.

4) how Trotsky comes across as a bit of a wimp in the movie, a sort of
benignly civilised, welladjusted Dutch uncle, lacking any real fire and
passion, and slumping into Kahlo's arms and body, as if, in so doing, he was
making an ultimate confession of male vulnerability or sexual incompetence,
as an act of submission to Kahlo's (generous and forgiving ?) charms and an
escape from his own wife Natalya Sedova, prior to getting an ice-pick into
his skull - as if his murder was a punishment for being sexually boring, and
for underestimating or misplacing the role of sexuality, correctly
expressed, in a balanced human life.

5) How Diego Riviera comes across as the "real winner" in the movie, the
real revolutionary or iconoclast, in a way which could suggest he was some
kind of patriarchal dirty old man.

Overall, the movie gave me the impression of a brilliantly contrived
caricature, which effectively obliterated real personalities and their real
lives in a sophisticated, steamy erotic metaphor. In this sense, the
interpretation did not do real justice to the facts as we known them.

It was radical only in depicting lifestyles which deviated from safe
bourgeois norms, but conservative an inaccurate in its actual portrayal of
these lifestyles, reducing the complexity of human motives too much, to
easily understood stereotypes.

Photographically the film was brilliant and colourful, the actors showed
great skill, and a serious attempt was made to convey authenticity in the
scenarios. But the real lives and art of Riviera and Kahlo, and the life and
literature of Leon Trotsky are superior to the movie's portrayal of them, at
least in my opinion.

The rather heroic artistic challenge the filmmakers took up, was to capture
the whole of the life of Kahlo in one movie, rather than, say, exploring one
episode of her life in detail. But the result is truncated, and the
characters are truncated - the story is in a sense too big, and more
profound, than the movie can portray through thoughtful visual images. The
images are suggestive, but the narrative cannot support them adequately.
Nevertheless the making of the movie, is something I support. It broke out
of a considerable number of cliche's, and therefore has considerable
creative merit.

As a matter of fact, I walked out of the movie irritated by certain
depictions in the movie, ignoring other movie goers and possible chain
gangs, which goes to show that you can take a film too seriously, but also
that a film can be a turn-off despite its erotic charge.

Jurriaan