Frida, beyond words

Julie Taymor, in her biopic, Frida, uses scenes in which dialog gives way to images, movement, and music.  In these scenes, Taymor fleshes out her characters, illuminates them and their experiences, and helps the viewer to grasp the complexity of their emotional journeys.  While these scenes are not literally “silent,” the viewer must rely on unspoken cues to connect key aspects of narrative.

One of the first of these scenes is one in which young Frida and her boyfriend, inspired by the confrontation with Diego and his naked model, collide in a secret sexual frenzy. By this point, we’ve seen Frida in her school uniform, rushing through corridors, a bumbling, flustered student.  We learn from her outburst, her challenge to established artist, Diego Rivera, that she is brave and opinionated, but the closet scene reveals her character more completely to the viewer: she is rebellious, adventurous, and free spirited.  At this point, however, these traits are hidden, and perhaps, underdeveloped.

Through this initial characterization, we, the viewers, understand more keenly the physical and emotional impact of the trolley accident in which Frida is critically injured.  The scene of the crash is silent and slow, the gold dust in Frida’s hand scatters and covers her bloody, broken body.  A bird takes flight.  The arrangement of the scene, Frida on the broken floor of the trolley, the golden air hovering around her, calls to mind a fairy tale, a spell that has been cast or broken.  Something has been forever altered.  When Frida awakes she will be a different person; she will enter a new world.

But the transformation is slow, a hibernation of sorts, a cocooning.  Frida paints her cast with butterflies.  She is the butterfly, in the process of changing.  The light and dark signals the passage of time to which she must bear still witness.  When the cast-cocoon is cut from her, she emerges a different creature.  From this point, the scenes devoid of dialog are full of Frida’s paintings, images of herself, her connections, her blood, metaphors of her continuing transformations.

Taymor uses the subsequent tango scene to further layer Frida’s character.  At this point in the narrative, Frida has joined the Communist party, and is accompanying Diego to an insider gathering.  Frida has a dawning sense that her relationship with Diego has transcended that of mentor/protege, but she is painfully aware of the trail of broken hearts he has left in his wake.  At the same time, she must prove herself to him and his comrades, a “men’s club” of artists, party bosses, and intellectuals.  She outdrinks Diego and his friend (Antonio Banderas), takes Ashley Judd’s hand and leads her to the floor.  The dance communicates a number of things about Frida; she is competitive and she is provocative.  At once, key information about Kahlo’s sexuality is revealed.  At the same time, however, the dance is a performance.  This unassuming woman, this small, disabled person, is someone the men need to watch, not only because she is beautiful and sexual, but also because she is their competition.  She will do more with fewer resources.  She will surpass them.  

The montage that begins the movie’s New York sequence is alive with fanfare, the illustrated city and Diego and Frida’s introduction to it.  This morphs into images of the movie King Kong, which in Frida’s mind (shown through further cartoonish illustration) becomes Diego, taking over New York, destroying and devouring.  Frida is in the shadow of Diego’s fame.  She literally paints on a tiny canvas before his great mural.  The lover she takes is first Diego’s.  Even though it is acknowledged that as a painter and a lover Frida is “better,” she has turned inward, and is largely a mute witness to Diego’s ascent.  

The silent scenes of the miscarriage, the hospital, and Frida painting her grief signal yet another transition for Frida.  Her emotions bleed onto her canvas.  Her paintings become receptacles for her suffering.  Called to her mother’s deathbed, Frida has become someone who has, in rapid succession, lost motherhood and a mother.  In the simple act of placing her mother’s dead rose behind her ear, she reveals an acceptance of death, an embracing of mortality.

The mostly silent (i.e. dialog-free) scenes, charting Frida’s decline after she witnesses Diego’s treacherous liaison with her sister, are full of images and music that illuminate Frida’s deteriorating mental state.  She cuts her hair, and her dress is somber, masculine, a stark contrast to her vibrant, flowing skirts and blouses.  The scenes are conspicuously absent of color.  She smokes and drinks to excess and stumbles around in dark interior spaces.  Her lowest point, which is at the same time, a turning point, comes in the bar, where Frida sits with Chavela Vargas, who is singing “La Llorona.”  Vargas’ vocal is not comforting, but demanding:

Si porque te quiero quieres, Llorona

Quieres que te quieres mas

Si ya te he dado la vida, Llorona

Que mas quieres?

Quieres mas?

The song speaks to Frida’s perpetual grief.  That there will be no end to it; however much she loves, more love will be demanded of her.  However much she grieves, more tears will be required.  And yet, there is beauty to this sadness:

Yo soy como el chile verde, Llorona

Picante pero sabroso.

(http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/3530822107858545520/)

Frida’s pain is delicious, her suffering is beautiful.

Frida’s affair with Trotsky is captured with a sequence of scenes in which Trotsky and Frida meet secretly, in close proximity to Diego and Trotsky’s wife.  In the preceding scene in the ruins, Frida learns Trotsky’s full tragic history, the loss of his children and his country at the hands of Stalin.  For Frida, he is a kindred spirit, and the two give in the urge to take their spiritual and emotional connection to a physical level.  Their connection has its consequences; both realize that their happiness cannot come at the expense of another’s pain, and Frida sees in Trotsky’s loyalty to his wife, what Diego has never given her.  She finally understands her own grief and disappointment in Diego as her husband.

In the ensuing Paris montage, the viewer experiences a flood of images of Frida smiling, Frida at the center of a vibrant social scene.  Frida is finally appreciated and enjoys a measure of fame.  She is photographed, surrounded by admirers, and even takes a glamourous lover.  Finally we see Frida’s public face, and understand how she is seen rather than how she sees herself.  True to her character, the character that has been created to this point, she experiences Paris as a shallow pleasure, and as when she was in New York, longs for home.

So much of Frida’s story, her character and the characters that shaped her, is communicated through Julie Taymor’s direction.  We are left with a greater understanding of pain as beauty, suffering as art.  Illustration, animation, film, and photograph help the viewer to navigate transition and reveal transformation in this complex’s artist life, a life which words alone cannot begin to capture.  




In my own writing, I think creating space, filling the space with significant objects, and describing movement within the space could be a way of using "silence."  The silent spaces in a text can provide me with opportunities to build suspense, negotiate relationships, and explore inner worlds.