MOVIE REVIEWS : ‘Ribbon Around a Bomb’: Flawed Portrait of Kahlo

“Frida Kahlo: A Ribbon Around a Bomb” (Monica 4-Plex) is a tiny package full of incendiary materials. But the mixture isn’t quite right; the explosion never happens.

The movie is fashioned from disparate elements--fragments of Abraham Oceransky’s play “The Diary of Frida Kahlo,” interviews with Kahlo’s old friends, old photos and numerous shots of her paintings--and, rather than reinforcing or resonating with each other, they begin to clash. Reality and re-creation scrape and grate on each other. And thepaintings--blazing like anguished suns or tattooed wounds trapped on canvas--obliterate everything else in the movie.

The subject is a rich one: Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, a figure who, since her 1954 death and the vogue of her work since the late ‘70s, has become something of a leftist icon.

For a post-feminist age, she may have all the elements: The woman apparently subjugated to her famous husband (Diego Rivera), and eventually equaling or surpassing him; the pain-stricken victim--of a streetcar accident at 19--who smiles through her suffering and makes art of her terror; the childless wife of a philandering spouse; the floridly dramatic Third World rebel, radical and bisexual; confidante of surrealists (Breton) and modernists (Picasso), and mistress of revolutionaries (Trotsky).

And more: the defiant iconoclast; the artist fixated on her own image, painting and repainting her self-portrait in a plethora of wild, weird backgrounds; the fatalist who said, “Death is my best friend.” All these personae combine to make her a kind of post-’70s touchstone.

The images survive into the movie, though sometimes they’re filtered or slicked up. Producer-star Cora Cardona, the co-founder of Teatro Dallas, is a skilled theater actress; she even bears a striking resemblance to Kahlo’s self-portraits and photographs--something noted when Cardona was only 4, by Diego Rivera himself. But her performance here seems forced, over-emphatic: one of those bang-you-on-the-head-with-every-syllable jobs actors sometimes mistakenly lavish on famous or admired historical subjects.

Producer-director Ken Mandel and producer-cinematographer Jeff Hurst don’t help her much. Ingmar Bergman may have long since proven that the most “cinematic” way to film an actress delivering a monologue is in extreme close-up against bare or neutral backgrounds, but Mandel and Hurst tend to keep Cardona in full or medium shot, emphasizing the sparse theatrical tableaux, the threadbare artifice.

The interpolations of “The Diary of Frida Kahlo” don’t work at all; Cardona’s Frida is finally reduced to screaming and rattling chains, almost as if she were Marley’s Ghost in “A Christmas Carol.” Even so, the “Frida Kahlo: A Ribbon Around a Bomb” (Times-rated: mature, for sexual discussions) has value--mostly because it tells us about Kahlo, however cursorily, and shows us her paintings, however briefly.

On and on they come, a gallery of sun, blood, laughter and grief: Kahlo on a hospital bed, with Rivera, surrounded by Mexican flora and fauna, her heart split in two, her forehead pierced with thorns. The face is probably what made her such an icon, with its bizarre androgyny--the burning eyes and sensuous mouth balanced by a mustached overlip and single black band of eyebrow. Watching that face here, in many guises and settings, we can see clearly why she kept on painting it over and over--and why it’s lodged in our minds ever since.

‘Frida Kahlo:

A Ribbon Around a Bomb’

Cora Cardona: Frida Kahlo

A Roxie Release. Director Ken Mandel. Producers Jeff Hurst, Cora Cardona, Ken Mandel. Original play Abraham Oceransky. Cinematographer Jeff Hurst. Music John Bryant, Frank Hames. With Quigley Provost, Costa Caglage. Running time: 1 hour.Times-rated Mature (Sexual themes and discussion).