Frida, naturaleza viva (1986)

User Rating:

7.1/10   

Director:

Paul Leduc

Writers:

José Joaquín Blanco (writer)
Paul Leduc (writer)

Release Date:

17 February 1988 (USA)

Genre:

Biography | Drama

Plot:

The most prominent female painter of Latin America, Frida Kahlo, is agonizing in her Coyoacán home. She evokes memories of her childhood...

Plot Keywords:

Mexican History | Polio | Muralism | Wheelchair | Amputee

Awards:

17 wins & 2 nominations

Cast

Ofelia Medina	...	Frida Kahlo
Juan José Gurrola	...	Diego Rivera
Max Kerlow	...	Leon Trotsky
Claudio Brook	...	Guillermo Kahlo
Salvador Sánchez	...	David Alfaro Siqueiros
Cecilia Toussaint	...	Frida´s Sister
Ziwta Kerlow	...	Trotsky's Wife
Valentina Leduc Navarro	...	Young Frida
Lolita Cortés	...	Sister of young Frida
Gina Morett	...	Nurse
Margarita Sanz	...	Friend
Juan Ángel Martínez	...	Wood worker
François Lartigue	...	Photographer
Odiseo Bichir	...	Young sandinista
Bruno Bichir	...	Young Sandinista

Also Known As:

Frida (USA)

Runtime:

108 min

Country:

Mexico

Language:

Spanish | Russian | French | German

Color:

Color

Sound Mix:

Dolby

Certification:

Finland:K-12 (re-rating) | Finland:K-14 (original rating) | Australia:M | West Germany:12

Filming Locations:

Coyoacán, México D.F., Mexico

Company:

Clasa Films Mundiales

Goofs:

Anachronisms: In the scene in which the man is giving a puppet show, he whistles the theme from Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf. This scene would have taken place in the '20s. The Prokofiev wasn't written until 1936.

Movie Connections:

Version of Frida (2002)

Soundtrack:

L'Internationale

Hauntingly beautiful

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.