Frida Lets It All Hang Out - On the Dance Floor and in Her Art

In Mr Lewenstein's class, we developed film history research papers.  I chose to write mine about the famous Mexican painter Frida Kahlo.  Below is an excerpt from my paper.  I compared what I saw in Salma Hayek's movie with what I found in my research:

Frida will always be known as a fierce individual who wasn’t afraid to express her sexuality.  When Frida married Diego, she had no idea what world she was entering into.  She must have felt like Alice dropping down the rabbit hole.  For Frida, Diego’s bohemian art world was this strange, weird place she probably considered like some freethinking Wonderland, filled with crazy people and peculiar creatures.  It’s probably right here where Frida discovered the full extent of her sexuality.  While her husband openly cheated on her, she began to be seen cavorting with more and more women.  According to her close friend,  Frida loved to go out and have a good time with the women.  They liked to drink and dance with each other at popular Mexico City cantinas.  On these nights,  Frida was known to drink “like a mariachi.”  This means, I suppose, anything goes.  Frida hid her bisexuality from no one.

The cantina scene captures Frida’s free-wheeling, free-stepping nature. Here Frida dances the sensual tango with a visiting female Italian photographer right in front of her husband.  The two women are all over the dance floor.  Their hands are all over each other.  The song is called “La Alcoba Azul – The Blue Bedroom.”  As Frida and her partner are dancing, you hear a singer in the background belt out these lyrics: “Vuelve a mí  Ámame sin luz En nuestra alcoba azul Donde no hubo sol para nosotros.” Come back to me.  Love me in the dark… At the end of the dance, the women embrace to share a French kiss to the applause of the crowd.  Even Diego looks on with love and admiration.

The astute eye may see elements of her bisexuality in her self-portraits.   For Frida, her self-portraits helped her explore her own identity.  “I paint myself because I am so often alone,” she once said, “and because I am the subject I know best.”   She was  probably all alone when she painted Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair.  In fact, it’s known that she was separated from Diego during this time.  Her creation of this work follows her heart-crushing discovery that her husband was sleeping with her sister.  During this period, she had left the couple’s home in Coyacan and moved into her own apartment in the center of Mexico City.  In Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair, Frida appears in an over-sized, darkly-colored man’s suit.  She has cut off all her hair.  We can see it strewn all over the floor.  The scissors are still in her hand.   Across the top of the painting, she writes the lyrics to a popular Mexican song of the Forties:  “Mira que si te quise, fue por el pelo…”   In English, the words come out “See, if I loved you, it was for your hair; now that you’re bald, I don’t love you anymore.”  Here Frida seems to be putting aside her feminine attributes.  Al that is left are her earrings.  

Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair shows up in the film.  There’s the portrait right in her room, and there is Frida cutting her hair off in front of the mirror.  She’s been drinking all night.  She’s alone.  It’s like life imitating art.  Her worlds are fusing together.  Playing in the background is “La Paloma Negra”  sung by a famous Mexican lesbian.  The lyrics tell Frida she should be out enjoying herself.  At times, Frida probably didn’t know which way to turn.