The best film I have ever seen is "Frida" with Salma Hayek. The film about controversial artist Frida Khalo - whose husband was Mexican artist Diego Rivera - based on the book "Frida: A Biography of Frida Khalo" by Hayden Herrera, was directed by Julie Taymor.
Julie Taymor tells the story of an extraordinary life. Frioda Khalo had a German Jewish father and Mexican mother. As a student, she starts meeting the great muralist Diego Rivera, boldly calls him "fat" and knows that he is the man for her.
Then she is almost mortally injured in a trolley crash that shatters her back and pierces her body with a steel rod. She was never to be free of pain again in her life. Taymor shows a bird flying from Frida's hand at the moment of the crash and later gold leaf falls on the cast (in which almost all her body was imprisoned): she uses magic realism to suggest how Frida was able to overcome pain with art and imagination. Frida's paintings often show herself, alone or with Diego, and reflect her pain and her ecstasy. She needed to paint not just to express herself but to live at all.
The film opens in 1953, on the date of Frida's only one-man show in Mexico. Her doctor tells her she is too sick to attend it. But she has her bed lifted into a flat-bed truck and carried to the gallery. This opening is connected with the movie's extraordinary closing scenes, in which death itself is seen as another work of art.
