Review of 'Frida'

Rewatched this, partly to get some interior decoration ideas for our new flat, which I'd like to Mexi-theme. I'd quite enjoyed it the first time round; the second time it was watchable enough, and visually interesting - I quite liked the way it managed to cinematically represent some of Frida Kahlo's pictures.

But I was aware of how little attention it actually gave to the politics. We see that Diego Rivera is a bit of a radical, and that he enjoys pissing off the man as well as sleeping with lots of women, but there's no sense that the politics is actually important to him or to Frida. We see a few seconds of demonstration footage, but there isn't any sense that Mexico was a ferment of genuine revolutionary fervour at this time, or that there was a real civil war going on. Trotksy is a lovely old bloke, but not a very convincing revolutionary, and there is similarly no sense that in giving him refuge the Cardenas government was making a very definite political commitment. It wouldn't have hurt to have given some sight of how huge his funeral procession was.

Not a bad film, but not a great one.

Watched in the Middle Floor at Springhill, from a legitimate DVD,