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Challenging The Limits Of Personal Freedom

Since I first read about her, I’ve avoided getting too close to Frida Kahlo. Frida was a Mexican painter known for her iconic self-portraits and surreal symbolism that explore themes of identity, the body, and death.

When I see self-portraits of Frida, I always wonder about her brilliant beauty that’s just so magnetic. And the unibrow and her scanty mustache, how are they sooo gorgeous on her? You see, I wouldn’t even be caught dead with a hint of hair on my lips.

But, every time I would come across her name or her paintings, I felt a strange hesitation that I should not dive too deep. What if learning about her unrestrained life – her defiance, her sensuality, her refusal to obey rules will unsettle the careful order I’ve built in mine? What if her fire burned holes through my good-girl conditioning?

How can I possibly emulate her carefree ways of living, and her rebel like attitude towards customs, I always wondered. What if her unreasonable push against the limits of personal thought and freedom were to encourage me to push my own boundaries?

After all, it’s been my life’s work to create a reputation for myself as a woman of substance, discipline and predictability.

But, recently on a long flight to India, boredom and curiosity got the best of me, and I watched Carla Gutiérrez’s 2024 documentary Frida. And that’s how I finally met the woman I had been avoiding.

Frida’s Mural On A Side Street In Barcelona, Spain

An Unapologetic Portrayal

The movie does a good job of presenting Frida just the way she was in real life – honest, savage, erotic and hilarious. There’s no dearth of drama in her life and throughout it all you see her riding the rollercoaster of emotions in her own unapologetic way.

The director has done a very tasteful job of keeping the narrative raw and fearless and in line with Frida’s artistic prowess. Her handwritten lines and her paintings form the basis of the lyrical animation and draw you in scene after scene with cinematic richness.

All her life, Frida Kahlo does what she wants, except when she was in her prime of her youth, she meets with a near-fatal bus accident and is bed ridden with a shattered spine. As she recovers, she uses her art to explore the different themes of life in bold ways.

You see her life through her missteps, her tragedies, her achievements and her indiscretions. And she’s painting about it all through out. She writes about art as survival and love as war. “I am not sick. I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint.”

She openly challenges the gender and sexual norms of the society she lived in, she has an affair and later marries Diego Rivera, a serial betrayer and her lifelong muse. The same man she would later go on to call “la gran caca” – the big piece of shit. Basically, she will do anything that’s the opposite of living life without “ruffling too many feathers”.

The Takeaway

Love her or criticize her, she’s a legend because she’s did not live a pretend life. She was a trailblazer who lived life on her own terms, highlighting the marginalized subjects of our culture and bringing them into mainstream conversations.

Throughout the movie, I was asking myself, questions like – how could she, how dare she, and then found myself asking, well, in a society terrified of truth, wasn’t she living hers?

And that’s why Frida Kahlo is not just a brand, she’s a manifesto. This film reminds us why the idea of “Frida” refuses to die in our culture that continues to memorialize her and her work on T-shirts, tattoos, museums, classrooms, and murals.

If you’re new to Frida, start here. At best she will command you to live your life with honesty (my personal request for you would be to not be so brutally selfish as her to get your ways, always). At worst, she will open you up and compel you to work on what makes you feel alive.

Either way, you win.

FRIDA – Official Trailer | Prime Video

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What Will You Do? 

If you’ve got one chance to make a dent in the universe. 

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage. ~ Anais Nin