Becoming Frida Kahlo
I must say this was a self-indulgent sycophantic mess, the first episode merely showed her birth, the influence of her parents, going to school and being involved in a terrible accident. Largely it was unremarkable and nearly everything that was said was opinion rather than having any concrete foundation. For example "Frida has to reinvent herself from scratch", Frida was 20 years of age, the first boyfriend was sent to Europe following the accident as his parents thought Frida an unsuitable match, but to infer so much from a first teenage platonic relationship is quite absurd. They really over-milked the cow!
With regard to the art, they state "she painted without external influences and created her own path, total tosh her artwork looks a pale copy of Diego Rivera and she absorbed every local and international art influence of the time, Kahlo did not invent surrealist art it influenced her.
Why this programme was all so slow I have no clue, we could have cover this in an hour.
The programme glosses over the ugly reality that Frida as a school girl was groomed by the serial womaniser Diego Rivera and married to him when she was 22 and he was 44.
The show keeps making bizarre political statements, firstly capitalism and wealthy people are not threatened by the left or communists, as they consider them deluded, knowing that tax receipts from capitalism pay for philanthropy and/or the welfare state. The truth is Rivera and Kahlo lived off wealthy peoples commissions all their artistic lives. To further infer any painter is the leader of any political movement is absurd, an artistic skill does not imply a vast eduction and/or intellect and every waking moment is devoted to art not arguing the rights and wrongs on any society.
If only they had focused on her work, as her life is only of interest in how it influenced this or that painting. Frida did only 143 paintings in her life, this is nothing in comparison to others, of these 143 paintings 55 paintings are self-portraits. To suggest she therefore has the stature of a Mexican Dali is massaging the obvious reality, her work is interesting at best but most of it is deeply derivative of Rivera and really quite self-indulgent. Lastly it is quite inexplicable that Kahlo is regarded a champion of women and the downtrodden when clearly this documentary of 3 hours demonstrated the complete opposite.
This documentary lacked authenticity over many of the facts, and failed to critique the artwork comprehensively, I'm giving this a 4 outta 10.