Frida, naturaleza viva

Mexican-born director Paul Leduc's 1984 look at the life of prominent Latin American painter Frida Kahlo, Frida, Naturaleza Viva, is a slow-paced, quiet, and poetic film told through image and song rather than narrative plot. Vastly different from the Julie Traymore version of Frida of 2002, a standard biopic that focused on her tempestuous relationships, it is told through fragmentary accounts of different events in Frida Kahlo's life using impressionistic flashbacks from her deathbed. Ofelia Median is perfect as Frida, fully capturing her passion, fighting spirit, and sensuality as well as her painful self-absorption as revealed in her numerous self portraits and disturbing depictions of body parts.

The film depicts Frida's painful physical condition as the result of a bus accident when she was eighteen, her radical politics, bisexuality, miscarriage, the amputation of her leg, and her relationships with Diego Rivera, Leon Trotsky, and David Siquieros. It omits, however, any discussion of Rivera's womanizing, her divorce and remarriage, drug use and drinking, or her embrace of Stalinism in her later years. The end result is a hauntingly beautiful but incomplete portrait of a remarkable woman that makes you want to run to the nearest bookstore to learn more about her life and art.