Frida, 2002

Additional Captures

Director: Julie Taymor

Actors: Salma Hayek (Frida Kahlo); Alfred Molina (Diego Rivera); Geoffrey Rush (Leon Trotsky); Ashley Judd (Tina Modotti); Edward Norton (Nelson Rockefeller)

Release Date: October 27, 2002

Filming: Mexico

During a break in the filming of "Original Sin", Antonio traveled to another film location in Mexico to do a cameo performance for his good friend and former co-star ("Desperado"), Salma Hayek. It had long been a dream of Salma's to bring the story of the famous and tragic Mexican artist, Frida Kahlo, to the big screen. She surrounded herself with both great actors and friends. The long battle to bring the film to fruition paid off in a big way as the movie won both major critical acclaim and Golden Globe and Oscar nominations for Salma.

Antonio, who only appears in the film for about 10 minutes, plays another famous (and famously eccentric) Mexican artist, David Alfaro Siqueiros. Siqueiros was Diego Rivera's (Frida Kahlo's husband) artistic and political rival.

Antonio's appearance in this film is very brief, and it is clear that he agreed to appear in the film as a favor to a friend (he did not receive a salary for his work, which took two days). However, the film is a beautiful collage of colorful and eccentric people. Frida Kahlo was a Marxist bohemian who disdained the conventional. Hers was truly an extraordinary life. She was born in 1907 to a German Jewish father and devoutly Catholic Mexican mother. She grew up in Mexico City at a time when it was a hotbed of exile and intrigue. She contracted polio at age six, was almost killed in a trolley crash that shattered her back and pierced her body with a steel rod at age 18 (she was never to be free of pain again and for long periods of time had to wear a body cast). In her paintings, which often featured herself as the subject, she laid bare the anguish and disappointment of her life. She overcame pain with art and imagination. Her work became an angry rebuke against fate, a survival mechanism and an inquiry into suffering. Surrealist Andre Breton called her paintings "a ribbon tied around a bomb." Unfortunately, in my opinion, rather than focus on that inflamed connection between art and life, the film instead focuses on her tumultuous marriage to muralist and notorious womanizer, Diego Rivera. The most celebrated female artist of the 20th century is reduced to a petulant harpy made hysterical by her husband's infidelities. Kahlo never experienced the acclaim in her lifetime that her work enjoys today, but instead remained in Rivera's shadow. She died in 1954 at the age of 47 having lived a bold and uncompromising life as a political, artistic and sexual revolutionary. Frida Kahlo was, as her biographer Hayden Herrera pointed out, a woman who "lived dying".

Synopsis by Lisa