Frida with Angela Campos

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
On the Bechdelcast, the questions ask if movies have women
and them, are all their discussions just boyfriends and husbands
or do they have individualism? It's the patriarchy, zeph and
best start changing it.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
With the Bechdel Cast.

Speaker 3 (00:16):
Hey, Jamie, Hi, Caitlin, would you draw me like one
of your freeda girls self portraits?

Speaker 2 (00:24):
Question Mark. Well, no, that's not how that works at all.

Speaker 3 (00:28):
Okay, yeah, that doesn't make sense. That's not how that works.

Speaker 4 (00:31):
I appreciate the ask, but really, you really need to
look within, look.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
To your darkest parts.

Speaker 3 (00:37):
What I should have said is, hey, Caitlin, would you
draw me like one of your selves?

Speaker 2 (00:45):
You know, we'll get there, We'll continue to navigate.

Speaker 3 (00:48):
It's a work in progress.

Speaker 4 (00:50):
Yeah, this joke will kind of coagulate throughout the episode.
In the meantime, Welcome to the Bechdel Cast. My name
is Jamie Loftus, my name is Caitlin Derante. This is
our podcast where we examine movies through an intersectional feminist lens,
using the Bechdel Test simply as a jumping off point.

(01:11):
And what is that though? I wonder well. The Bechdel
test is a media metric originally created by queer cartoonist
Alison Bechdel, often called the Bechdel Wallace Test because it
was co created with her friend Liz Wallace. Originally made
as a bit as will become actually relevant in today's episode,

(01:32):
but it was originally created as a bit for her
comic collection Dykes to watch out for, and was originally
sort of this conversation about how not just women or
people of marginalized genders never talk to each other in movies,
but how.

Speaker 2 (01:47):
Queer women specifically never get to talk to each other
in movies.

Speaker 4 (01:51):
A lot of versions of this test, the one we
use requires that two characters of a marginalized gender with
names speak to each other about something other than a
man for more than two lines of dialogue, and it
should be you know, a plot relevant exchange that would
be nice, and we're we're going to get into it today.

(02:12):
So let's get our guest in here, a long time
movie request, and it's happening, baby, It's finally here.

Speaker 3 (02:18):
Our guest is an art historian and is currently in
a PhD program in art and education. So I am
not the person with the highest degree.

Speaker 2 (02:32):
Hey, don't be humble. You used to teach paint night you.

Speaker 3 (02:38):
Art, Yeah, but I only have a master's. I don't
have a PhD.

Speaker 2 (02:41):
That's true. And you do need a master's to do
paint night.

Speaker 3 (02:45):
You need a PhD to teach paint night class. Sorry,
I have completely derailed your introduction. But yes, art historian
and in a PhD program in art and education. It's
an hala campos. Welcome, helone, welcome. Bye.

Speaker 5 (03:00):
I'm very happy to be here, so excited.

Speaker 3 (03:02):
So happy to have you.

Speaker 5 (03:03):
I still only have a master's degree.

Speaker 3 (03:05):
Too, So okay, well that makes me feel better.

Speaker 5 (03:09):
I'm currently in the PhD program. So yeah, it's fine, mate,
It's it's okay. Don't worry. We're in the same.

Speaker 3 (03:15):
Yeah, I will not be upscaled on my own podcast. No,
So we're talking about Freda, the two thousand and two
biopic directed by Julie Taymoor starring Salma Hayek, and.

Speaker 2 (03:30):
Well, come on, and Alfred Molina.

Speaker 3 (03:32):
And sorry, Alfred, of course, Alfred Molina.

Speaker 2 (03:35):
Now hold the damn phone. We can't. Let's not bury
the wee.

Speaker 4 (03:40):
Alfred Molina is in this.

Speaker 3 (03:43):
Movie, sorry to erase a male presence.

Speaker 4 (03:46):
Well, as we've said many times on this show, and
it will be complicated in this movie. If Alfred Molina
is speaking, it passes the factel test automatically rules be damned.

Speaker 3 (03:56):
That is yes, yes, Well, we haven't brought up Alfred
Molina quite some time.

Speaker 2 (04:01):
It's because you got married, so I'm moving on.

Speaker 3 (04:06):
He's off the market for you.

Speaker 2 (04:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (04:09):
Anyways, sorry, So we're talking about Freda and we're curious, Angela,
what is your relationship with the movie with Frieda Callo
as an artist and historical figure. Tell us everything.

Speaker 5 (04:25):
Well, first, I remember watching the movie when I was
way too young to be able to watch it. I
remember that it was I don't know if my mom
had it on DVD or something, but I remember watching
it because especially the scene. I don't want any spoilers yet,
but the scene with the sister traumatized me horribly. Oh yeah, yeah,

(04:48):
So I remember tiny parts of the film in my
unconscious mind, and I never rewatched it until I started
studying artists at eighteen nineteen years old. So, when you're
an art historian, especially in Mexico, you're kind of tired
of Frida Calo. Well, even if you're a Mexican person,

(05:10):
you're kind of tired of of Frida because she has
been exploited by the capitalist system in a way that
she would have hated being a communist.

Speaker 3 (05:19):
No exactly.

Speaker 5 (05:20):
Yes, yeah, but she's constantly, constantly in our media, in
our international propaganda to come to Mexico and the idea
people have of Mexico so as a Mexican is it's
kind of annoying. So people tend to put her away,
no and say, ah, Frida Calo, I don't like her.

(05:41):
No so, And the taboo in art history, I believe
is to like her. So when I had my twentieth
century art class, because you have other artists from twentieth
century that are important, like Marie Squiero, not Tina Modotti,
who is in a movie of course, Remeliosa or Leonora Carlington.

(06:03):
All of these women that surrounded the same a time
and space as Prida Galo tend to be more popular
within the art history crowd. But then you realize, when
I had my art history class for the twentieth century,
I really found out the true sense and the true
the importance of fridacal No. Her paintings are not only

(06:24):
this thing of oh I'm so sad, I'm so sick.
I have a horrible life, which we all complain about constantly.
But it's a thing of how she pioneered something in
art that is so common nowadays, and maybe that's why
we don't notice it or consider it as important because
we have normalized it. But she did it first, and

(06:46):
it's not about her technique, her esthetic. It's about that
innovation that she brought to art history. And I found
that out until I studied the twentieth century in the
last symesters of my degree, and it was extramely shocking
because I realized my internalized missa genia against Rida Callo,
my prejudices against her, and how stereotypes of her had

(07:09):
shaped the image I had of her, instead of just
letting go and going with the flow and realize myself
if I liked her or not, which is something that
I also think. S al Mahaik said about her that
she didn't like her at first, and then she explored
her and she realized that she was amazing. That's what
happened to me too. So that's my journey with Ridakalo

(07:30):
and now I of course love her and yeah, what
about you so interesting?

Speaker 3 (07:36):
I mean that, Yeah, I feel like that happens a
lot where something gets mainstream afied.

Speaker 4 (07:43):
Yeah, like over it's like saying you like Coldplay.

Speaker 3 (07:46):
You're like, exactly, sure you do, but everybody does.

Speaker 5 (07:51):
Everybody does, and everybody when they come to Mexico. I
have cousins in Spain and they're like, I want to
see Frida. I want to see Frida, And I was like,
they behave, like Frida and Diego are the Sistine Chapel
or something, And then I realize they are for people
that aren't from here. And we have normalized going to
be Yes artists and se Diego's murals, we have normalized
being close to Lacasa Soul. We have normalized those things

(08:13):
about these great artists because we have them at least
in Mexico City, and being very centralist here unfortunately, but
at least in Mexico City, we have them very close
to us. So it's also a thing of re cherishing
what we have in our own art history and realizing
it's it's not just anything that we should skip and

(08:38):
and consider. Oh again, no, it's examly that we should
maybe explore from other perspectives.

Speaker 3 (08:43):
Sometimes things are very well known because they are good, yeah,
and it so rarely happens, but in the case of
Free to Callow, It's true. Yes, Jimmy, how about you?
What's your history?

Speaker 4 (09:00):
I had not seen this movie before for a silly
reason that I will get to.

Speaker 2 (09:03):
But I was introduced to.

Speaker 4 (09:06):
Frieda Callo's work through what we're going to talk about today,
this very sort of sanitized image of who she was.
I probably was introduced to Free to Callo in high school,
like on a pair of socks or something. I like,
she's a very frequently and like you were saying on
there's like the fact that her politics mean that she

(09:29):
would fucking hate that.

Speaker 2 (09:32):
But she felt like, Yeah.

Speaker 4 (09:33):
This pantheon of frequently reproduced figures that I actually didn't
know much about. You would see her next to like
Einstein and like all of these sort of iconic innovative
people just presented without context for monetary gain.

Speaker 2 (09:48):
That's how I learned who she was. And then I.

Speaker 4 (09:53):
Did read the book this movie is based on in
high school, a biography of Free to Callo by Hated Herrera.
I read that in high school and like completely fell
in love with her just out of sight. I have
a framed print of the two Fridas. Yeah, the more
I learned about her I mean she's still to this day.

(10:13):
I mean it's like a travesty that she's presented, so,
you know, simply, and I feel like in this way
that is very white feminism driven, completely lacking context, lacking
her politics, lacking her identity, and lacking her queerness as well,
like which was something I had to learn from a book.
It wasn't something that was readily being printed about her

(10:34):
when I was in high school.

Speaker 2 (10:36):
So I've always been fascinated by her.

Speaker 4 (10:38):
I avoided this movie for years because a college professor
who was really mean to me is one of the
credited screenwriters. So for one of so, Diane Lake, I'm
calling your ass out. You were such an asshole to
me in twenty fourteen, and so, I like kind of
vowed to never watch this movie due to the.

Speaker 2 (11:02):
Transgressions of one Diane Lake.

Speaker 4 (11:05):
However, I am very glad that I finally have cause
to watch it because there's so much to talk about.

Speaker 2 (11:12):
I'm so curious, but I don't know.

Speaker 4 (11:14):
I feel like I'm going to figure out how I
feel about it in real time. I like Julie Taymoor
in general. I think she's a very creative director.

Speaker 2 (11:23):
I was one of the cringe fans of across the
universe me too, good, good, Yeah, I love her.

Speaker 5 (11:30):
I still played for my students when we see the
Vietnam War and stuff. I still play something because it's amazing.
I don't care.

Speaker 2 (11:40):
I was like, you had to be there, and if
you were there.

Speaker 5 (11:43):
You understand exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (11:45):
Well, we'll talk about her a little bit.

Speaker 4 (11:46):
I've also wanted to shout out her funniest credit, which
is the Bad Spider Man music.

Speaker 2 (11:52):
Oh yeah, Killing All the Spider.

Speaker 5 (11:54):
Man, the musical that she'll not be named. Yes.

Speaker 4 (11:59):
So anyways, I hadn't seen it, and I am very
glad that I did, because it gave me like reason
to revisit her life, which I hadn't in a while. Kaitline,
what is your history with this film and this political figure.

Speaker 3 (12:14):
I had seen the movie before, probably about twenty years ago,
and I didn't revisit it, although I remember liking it
at the time, but enough time had passed that I
forgot almost everything you learn in the movie, and then
I relearned much of it by visiting the Free to

(12:37):
Callo Museum in Mexico City. I went to La Casasoul
and I went with friend of the cast Adriana Ortega,
who was on our Youtumama dambiena episode Loved and who
coincidentally connected us with you Anhela.

Speaker 2 (12:54):
She's just the best.

Speaker 5 (12:55):
Yeah, she's Yeah.

Speaker 3 (12:56):
She took me to the museum and obviously much of
her art is in the museum, as well as like
different dresses she wore, different outfits she wore throughout her life,
different kind of medical apparatus that she wore, and I
was like, oh, right, she's dealt with chronic pain throughout

(13:17):
her life. I also relearned that she was a communist.
I relearned that she was bisexual, all this stuff, and
I was like, oh yeah. And then so remembering that
this was about a year ago that I went to
the museum and relearned all this information, So I was like,
I wonder how much of that is in this biopic,

(13:37):
because I was like, I bet Hollywood is gonna like
wash a lot of that out.

Speaker 2 (13:42):
I thought that.

Speaker 4 (13:43):
Her bisexuality would have been sanitized big time.

Speaker 3 (13:46):
But I mean, there are a lot of aspects of
Freda's life, as far as I can tell, that are
somewhat erased or scaled back on in this biopic, But
it does show more about her than what I would
have expected, because I was like, oh, I bet this
movie like Capitalism washes her political ideology. I bet it

(14:09):
straight washes her queerness, you know, but it it doesn't.
It doesn't. And we'll talk about that a lot. But yeah,
I really enjoyed going to the museum and learning about it,
and then rewatching this movie. I was like, oh my gosh,
setting aside things that the movie might again scale back
on or kind of a RaSE about Frida's life, it's

(14:30):
a really enjoyable movie.

Speaker 5 (14:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (14:32):
I find it very fun and entertaining, and I enjoy
it just as a piece of cinema. And then I
also I didn't finish it. I have about twenty minutes left.
But there's a documentary called Freeda that came out recently, yeah,
on Prime that takes excerpts from her diary, from letters

(14:57):
she wrote, correspondences from other figures in her life, including
Diego Rivera and other friends and lovers of hers and
their diaries, and it just has all this sort of
like voice over photographs of her, video of her, I
guess film film footage of her, obviously her works of art,

(15:18):
and so that provides a little bit more context. So
I learned some more stuff from that, and uh, yeah,
I really appreciate free to call it as an artist
and historical figure. And I like the movie a lot,
but there's lots to talk about. Yes, so let's take
a quick break and then we'll come back and get

(15:38):
into the recap.

Speaker 2 (15:49):
And we're back. We're back. Shall we get into the
flim the movie.

Speaker 4 (15:54):
I just was like, I'm kind of panicking about but
you know what, I just I need Diane like to
know how I feel.

Speaker 2 (16:00):
Let's leave it in. Let's leave it in.

Speaker 3 (16:04):
I could bleep out the name if you wanted to.

Speaker 4 (16:07):
I guess that there are four credited writers on this movie,
and I guess an uncredited scriptwrite from Edward Norton, which
I don't even know if I want to talk about.
I was like, when you learn a fact and you're like,
h I don't know if I can engage with that
fact right anyways, No.

Speaker 3 (16:24):
Leave it in, Okay, We'll leave it in. Okay. So
the movie opens on Frida Callo as an older adult
near the end of her life. She's in bed which
is being loaded onto a truck. We will find out
why because this pays off later in the movie. Then
we flash back to nineteen twenty two in Mexico City.

(16:48):
Frida is a teenager. I think she would have been
around fifteen years old at the time renowned artist Diego
Rivera played by A one Alfred Molina.

Speaker 4 (17:00):
Oh Fort Molina. I will say, I love Salamahayak so much.
It was so distracting watching her be fifteen years old.

Speaker 5 (17:09):
Truly.

Speaker 4 (17:10):
She was doing this like I don't know, like taking
this childlike stance. Yeah, just get a different actor. It's
just a couple scenes.

Speaker 5 (17:18):
I mean, was in her thirties when she recorded a film,
So it's like, yeah, that's strich.

Speaker 4 (17:22):
Yeah, very very movie like it happens all the time.
But the cut too, is severe. It was like whoa, okay, cool.
It reminded me of an episode of like Penn fifteen
kind of it was giving Penn fifteen.

Speaker 5 (17:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (17:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (17:35):
Anyways, so Diego Rivera is at her school painting a
nude portrait of a woman with whom he's also having
an affair, and Frida and her friends sneak in too
watch him work. One of these friends is her boyfriend
Alejandro aka Alex.

Speaker 2 (17:53):
Played by baby Diego Luna.

Speaker 3 (17:56):
Oh love to see him. So, Jamie, You're lifelong crush
is in the movie, and my more recent crush, Diego
Luna is in the movie. So the boys are there.

Speaker 5 (18:10):
He's Mexico's crush too. Yeah, human guy. Oh my god,
Mexico's proudest moment.

Speaker 4 (18:18):
That's another there being Caitlin crush.

Speaker 3 (18:21):
Yeah, they're my boys. Okay, So they are together, Frida
and Alex. Then we see Frida's childhood home. We meet
her mother, her father who is a painter and photographer,
her sister Christina played by Mia Maestro, and she's about
to get married. So they're gearing up for the wedding.

(18:45):
One day, Frida and Alex are on a bus. This
is when she was eighteen years old, discussing politics and Marxism.
The bus crashes, leaving Frida with several serious injuries broken bones,
her pelvis was impaled by the handrail of the bus,

(19:06):
and she has several operations in this Really I think
cool stop motion animation sequence.

Speaker 4 (19:13):
Yeah, for a time, you see like a biopic about
an artist and it doesn't even attempt to like bring
in their craft into the filmmaking.

Speaker 2 (19:20):
I was so glad they did that. It looked really cool.

Speaker 3 (19:22):
Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 5 (19:23):
Yeah, and it was very Julie de Marco that too, Like, yes,
the whole esthetic of that of that scene because in
a crossing universe, for example, she does similar things. And
I also love that they use the skulls the calacas
because of the relationship with Rita's idea of that, but
also Mexican typical art very cool.

Speaker 3 (19:46):
So she's in recovery for a long time after the accident.
Doctors are uncertain if she'll ever walk again. One day,
Alex comes in and tells Frida that he's moving to Europe,
so they effectively break up and Frida is devastated. And
then while she's recuperating, her parents gift her painting supplies

(20:10):
and they install a mirror on the ceiling of her
four poster bed so that she can paint self portraits.
So she starts painting a lot, and eventually she starts
walking again, and one day she approaches Diego Rivera and
shows her paintings to him and wants his professional opinion

(20:31):
because she's hoping to make a career out of painting
to make money and help support her family. They have
substantial medical bills that have piled up from all of
these operations, and Diego Rivera is like, wowie wow a wooga,
you're a great painter and your work is very original

(20:54):
and it's terrific. And so he becomes a mentor to
her and kind of takes her under his wing. He
brings her to a party full of artists and political activists.
They're talking about you know, socialism and communism and drinking
and you know stuff that you do at a party.

(21:15):
One of those parties, right, Antonio Benders is there as
the Videlfarro Cicios. He and Diego are like frenemies.

Speaker 5 (21:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (21:26):
I never thought i'd see the day where Alfred Blina
and Antonio bender has got into a physical altercation.

Speaker 2 (21:32):
But today was that day.

Speaker 5 (21:35):
By the way, a very big favor by casting Antonio
and they just let.

Speaker 3 (21:39):
Me say that, oh is because is he not?

Speaker 5 (21:43):
Yeah, he didn't look like that. No, no, no, all.

Speaker 3 (21:48):
I mean Alfred Blina is casting of Diego Rivera like
it was.

Speaker 5 (21:52):
Also a favor for yes.

Speaker 4 (21:55):
The biopic treatment in the biop at least.

Speaker 3 (22:01):
Yeah, So we're at this party. Ashley Judd is also
there playing Tina Medotti, who was an Italian American photographer, model, actor,
political activist, she and Freda do a sexy dance and
have a little kiss together. Meanwhile, Diego is trying to
sleep with Freda. He is a known womanizer, and she's like,

(22:26):
I'm not gonna sleep with you, dude, and he's like, okay, fair,
We'll just be comrades, colleagues and friends, but we'll never
sleep with each other.

Speaker 2 (22:35):
And that gets her horny, and then.

Speaker 3 (22:37):
They immediately they immediately start making out and having sex.

Speaker 4 (22:43):
I do love that Freda from the very beginning of
this movie is canonically horny, because that also seems to
be historically true.

Speaker 3 (22:50):
Yes, yes, very horny person who had many affairs.

Speaker 4 (22:57):
Truly a murderer's row list of lovers, extramarital affairs like
she had Paul.

Speaker 3 (23:04):
Yeah, yeah, goals, you know, incredible, Yeah, my goals. At least,
so time passes, Freda and Diego fall in love. They
get married, though her mother disapproves of the marriage because
Diego Rivera is an atheist and a communist. Frida also
has doubts about her relationship with Diego. We see at

(23:28):
the wedding Diego's ex wife, Lupe Marine played by Valeria Golino,
causes a scene she insults Frieda. Frida gets upset that
Diego doesn't defend her. It's day one of them being
married and already not off to a great start.

Speaker 2 (23:46):
Or at all. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (23:48):
Then Frida finds out that Lupe lives right above Diego's
apartment with the children they have together, which infuriates Frida
at first, but then she and Loupe start like hanging
out out and Lupe teaches Frida how to make her
molay recipe, and she tells Frida about Diego Afferre's various infidelities,

(24:10):
and this pattern of behavior does not change with Freida.

Speaker 2 (24:15):
No imagine that a man that changing impossible? Yeah, wun't you?

Speaker 3 (24:24):
So Frida finds out about his many affairs, often with
the models he paints portraits of. There's also a political
undercurrent to the film, as previously kind of hinted at.
But Diego has painted a socialist portrait in a government
building in Mexico City, but his party thinks he's a

(24:46):
trader because he's like making art for a bourgeois government.
So there's like this push and pull there.

Speaker 4 (24:54):
He's making art for Edward Norton Rockefeller, which was yes,
the most interesting jump scare in this movie for me
where you're like, what.

Speaker 2 (25:02):
The hell are you doing here?

Speaker 3 (25:07):
I had a similar jump scare with Ashley Judd. Oh yeah,
I was like, uh yeah, what is she doing here?

Speaker 5 (25:13):
I was expecting an Italian actress or something, and they
actually judge showed up right right.

Speaker 3 (25:18):
Well, isn't Valeria Galino an Italian actress?

Speaker 5 (25:21):
Wouldn't she is the one who plays Slooper Marino.

Speaker 2 (25:24):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (25:25):
Yeah, she probably would have made more sense in that
role anyway. So that's about to happen where Frida and
Diego go to New York for a solo exhibition of
Diego's Diego then paints a mural in the Rockefeller Building.
Edward Norton is playing like Rockefeller Junior. Frida's voiceover is

(25:46):
talking about the class disparity and poverty she sees in
New York. This is also highlighted in that documentary. I
was referencing the way she talks about New York, the
way she talks about like rich Americans especially, She's like,
these motherfuckers are the most boring losers I've ever met.
She talks about like having visited Harlem and how it

(26:09):
was such a beautiful, vibrant neighborhood that reminded her of
neighborhoods in Mexico City, like the way she describes New
York I found very funny. Anyway. Diego continues to be
unfaithful to Freda on this trip, but Frida is also
having affairs. We see her with a woman who Diego

(26:30):
head also slept with. Then Frida reveals to Diego that
she's gregnant, although he expresses concern about her body being
able to handle a pregnancy because of the injury she sustained,
and sure enough, she has a miscarriage and is rushed

(26:50):
to the hospital. Her miscarriage inspires some of her paintings.
It's obviously very devastating to her also, and around this
time that Frieda's mother falls ill and passes away. Diego
is still in New York doing this Rockefeller Building painting,

(27:11):
and he has put Vladimir Lenin into the mural, and
some people are like woo hoo, hero, and then all
the capitalists are like, boo, take that out of there,
but Diego refuses to compromise his vision, so he's fired
from this commission and the painting is destroyed, which enrages Diego.

(27:34):
They return home to Mexico, where he feels like restless
and creatively unfulfilled, and he resents being back in Mexico
he was having a great time in New York. And
it's kind of throughout the movie, but it's especially around
this point where I'm like, what about Frieda's art, Like
we see more of that?

Speaker 5 (27:54):
Yeah, because he was also very resentful against her because
they returned Mexico because she was homesick. That was his
idm oh so, so he's like, Nah, this is your
fault that we're here. Yeah, and yeah, she says something
along the lines of I want to return to that
artist that you were painting, Maggie, Yes, and not being

(28:17):
a pompos guy in brockefit.

Speaker 3 (28:19):
Corporate chill, yeah, capitalist stooge.

Speaker 2 (28:23):
Right. I that just not as well, Kaitlyn.

Speaker 4 (28:26):
I was curious what others thought about it, were like,
I feel like we see a lot of Frida's paintings,
you know, brought to life through these stop motion animations
that Samahayak is very frequently in, and they're presented, but
like it's not fully contextualized what is motivating them? And
I wish that there was a little more, especially in

(28:47):
a biopic about an artist, to like have a fuller
idea of what was inspiring these pieces, because I loved
the visuals of it, but it felt like a little
less focused on her art than I would have liked.

Speaker 3 (29:02):
Yeah, and we'll talk more about it. But that was
something I definitely noticed throughout the movie.

Speaker 4 (29:07):
But I also know that, like in her lifetime, her
art career was not sufficiently like Diego Rivera's art career
always got precedence over hers too.

Speaker 2 (29:15):
I don't know, yeah, right, and.

Speaker 5 (29:17):
This was a systemic issue in Mexican and art ya exactly.

Speaker 3 (29:20):
My thing is, well, if that was like where his
art was always like overshadowing hers, like, shouldn't the movie
like call more attention to that and like address that. Yeah,
examine the systemic patriarchal, sexist context for that, anyway, we'll
talk more about it. So then Freda hires her sister, Christina,

(29:43):
who had recently left her abusive husband, to help out
in Diego's studio. Diego and Christina promptly have sex, which
is like the ultimate betrayal to Frida. She I don't
know if tolerated was the right word, but she put
up with his infidelities, but this was like the last

(30:05):
straw him sleeping with her sister, So she leaves Diego
and she stops talking to her sister for a while.
Frieda moves back into the house she grew up in.
She cuts off all her hair, making her the baldest
woman in charge. She starts dressing androgynously some of the time,
which is something we've seen her do already different times

(30:26):
throughout the film. It's also clear that she's having trouble
supporting herself. She considers selling some of her paintings, but
comments are made about how they don't have enough commercial
appeal sort of thing. Then Diego approaches Frieda asking if
she'll house Leon Trotsky played by Jeffrey Rush and his

(30:50):
wife Natalia, who have been granted asylum in Mexico after
being exiled from the Soviet Union and then from Norway.
I think, and Frida agrees. So Trotsky moves in and
he takes to Frida. Immediately, he marvels her paintings. He
really likes her, and they start having an affair. They

(31:16):
also visit some pyramids, yes where I also went on
that same trip to Mexico City, and they're stunning, but
I was like, wow, I recognize these places. I went
there and so this affair is ongoing between Frida and Trotsky.
Natalia finds out about it, so she and Trotsky move out,

(31:39):
which is dangerous for them, and an assassination attempt is made,
although Trotsky survives it this one at least.

Speaker 5 (31:47):
Just a quick note that I found out earlier that
the actress who plays Natalia Trotzky's wife, and Salamahayek had
worked together Indlos Milos, Mexican Away from nineteen ninety five previously.
Oh well, yeah, yeah, so in this film their enemies
of course, because she ends up hating Frida Calo for

(32:08):
sleeping with her husband, but they had previously worked together
in a very good Mexican film. Yeah, that's so cool.

Speaker 3 (32:14):
Yeah, I'll have to check that one out. So then
Frida goes to Paris for an exhibition of hers.

Speaker 4 (32:23):
And the only people she hates more than Americans are
French fields, which is that seems.

Speaker 2 (32:29):
To be you know, the order of operations there.

Speaker 3 (32:34):
And she's writing letters to Diego saying that she misses
him and she does want to be with him after all,
but the next time they see each other, he asks
for a divorce. Trotsky is then eventually murdered and the
Mexican government thinks that Diego had something to do with it,
and so they interrogate Frida, asking where Diego is, but

(32:57):
she won't cooperate, so she's arrested and put in jail.
I think is what happens here. Her sister Christina bails
her out and then they make up. Frida's health has
started to decline around this point. Some of her toes
are amputated after they're discovered to be gangrenous, And the

(33:17):
movie doesn't make this super clear, but I think she's
had additional operations and again is suffering from chronic pain.
Diego comes back and wants to get married again, and
at first Frida's like, I don't need your pity. I
don't need you to save me, and he's like, I'm
the one who needs saving. So they get married again,

(33:39):
and by now it's I think nineteen fifty three, she
finally has her first solo exhibition of her paintings in
her own country, something that she's been waiting for her
whole life. But she's too ill to leave her.

Speaker 5 (33:54):
Bed because she had her leg amputated. Two in nineteen
fifty three.

Speaker 3 (33:58):
Right, which is like somewhat clear in the movie.

Speaker 5 (34:02):
Yeah, because she takes the leg now.

Speaker 3 (34:05):
Yeah, She's like, give me my leg back.

Speaker 5 (34:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (34:09):
So Diego goes to this exhibition on her behalf. He
gives a monologue about her work as an artist.

Speaker 2 (34:15):
Big movie moment that also happened.

Speaker 3 (34:19):
Happened in real life where Frida shows up. She has
had people carry her in in bed so that she
can enjoy the event, but you know, obeyed the doctor's
orders of like not leaving her bed. And then shortly
after this she passes away on July thirteenth, nineteen fifty four.

(34:42):
So that's the movie. Let's take another quick break and
then we'll come back to discuss and we're back. One
of the main things that I I am curious about
Angela is as far as what we know about Frida Carlos'

(35:06):
life and art and political positions and all of that,
how does it compare to what is shown in the movie.
And are there important things about Frida that were left
out or glossed over in this biopic.

Speaker 5 (35:25):
I believe generally she was depicted very accurately because Almachayk
was very passionate about this. She even contacted Dolores Olmelo,
who was the last lover and the person who, aside
from his kids, held Diego Riveda's inheritance and Frida Carlos artwork.

(35:47):
So she was a very rich woman and there was
a museum that recently closed in the south of Mexico
City that had all her collections and stuff. But Salmachayik
contacted this woman and asked her for permission to put
Frida's paintings in the film, and sal Machaik, I think,
was very passionate about this project, so she didn't want
to depict Rida Calo in a way that wasn't truthful.

(36:10):
But again, it has some things that are immediately not true,
like the fact that all the dialogue is in English
and they try to include some Spanish in a sometimes
in a forced way, and like stereotypical Mexican way, I think.
But I think that the spirit of Rida Calo is
very well represented in the terms of her being a rebel.

(36:33):
Every time they say she cannot do something, she finds
a way or a loophole to do it. The horny
aspect that you were mentioning, no or I think what
is very washed down is how violent Diego was towards
Frida in his relationship with her, because it's still very romantic.

(36:54):
I understand that it's from Frida's perspective, which was very romanticized,
and her idea of him. Never she never realized how
violent it was what he did to her, But it
could have been more critical in that way because it
was terrible. He was a very very bad man, and
not only towards Frida. Earlier on, I mentioned other Mexican

(37:15):
female artists from this time, including Marie Squeredo, who was
If we use intersectionality as a tool for this, we
can see that she has a higher level of dissidence
and because she was a brown woman, for example, she
was racialist. And Marie Quero wanted to paint murals and
she was extremely targeted, but she could only paint canvas

(37:36):
paintings because Cicos and Rivera never let women have public
spaces for muralism, which is very interesting because there is
a book called Lipse la Tlunas by Dina co Misenko,
a researcher that basically discovered female muralists in Mexico who
did paint, but they granted them small spaces. Now instead

(37:58):
of the big lace where the president holds his and
now hers because we will not have female president speeches.
They gave them the little building in the little part
of town that nobody actually saw. No, And this was
because of a monopoly that these guys had, these men
had in muralism in Mexico. And also it has to

(38:22):
do with the rivetas incoherence with his political discourse and
his political beliefs, because Fridaclo was much more coherent than him.
She never sold out, let's say, and the Oribta was
coherent only when he could be kind of dramatic about it,
like with the Rockefeller thing. There he decided, no, no, no,

(38:44):
I have to follow my ideology and I will never
back down. But then why did you go there in
the first place if you're such a communist, right.

Speaker 2 (38:54):
It always felt like a pr thing.

Speaker 4 (38:57):
From his Yeah, yeah, like deciding halfway through painting something
for Elon Musk, like, actually I don't like this guy.

Speaker 2 (39:04):
You're like, well, we are.

Speaker 3 (39:06):
Here and he already paid you.

Speaker 5 (39:07):
Yeah. So he was kicked out of the Communist Party
from Mexico three times because of these incoherences. And Freda
was much more strong in this sense too. And I
think that all of those little nuances I mean, it's
a film. It's a two hour film. You can really
depict them exactly, but there are little details that I

(39:29):
think would enrich this general idea we have a freedom
and make her even more of an admirable character like
we see her when we find out all of these nuances.

Speaker 4 (39:41):
Thank you for contextualizing that better, because I think that
that also speaks to Kaitlyn what you were saying a
little earlier about While we see a lot of her work,
the context of how welcome women were or were not
into art in Mexico and the US at the time
isn't fully explore in a way that I feel like
would make sense to do in this movie.

Speaker 2 (40:05):
And I also, I mean, I found.

Speaker 4 (40:07):
A quote from Diego Rivera because I remember from reading
this book all these years ago that the abuse that
he subjected to her and others was horrific, And I
was like, one of the disappointing elements of the movie,
or I think the most disappointing element of the movie
to me was kind of making the Hollywood choice to

(40:28):
have the action of the movie we're following Frida's life,
but the most important thing we're following, according to the movie,
as her relationship with Diego, which obviously that's complicated because
it was one of the most deeply important relationships of
her life. Anyways, here's this quote I found from Rivera
that sort of bears this out. He said, if I

(40:50):
ever loved a woman, the more I loved her, the
more I wanted to hurt her. Frida was only the
most obvious victim of this disgusting trait.

Speaker 2 (40:59):
So he also stated himself.

Speaker 5 (41:02):
Like, don't do it right right.

Speaker 4 (41:06):
Well, one of the things that I thought was interesting
because I went back and fact checked this because I
was like, what a weird line of dialogue if this
was made up. But he says early in the movie
essentially when he says like, if we get married, it
will have to be an open marriage because I can't
do anything else. And he says like, oh yeah, I

(41:28):
talked to this doctor and he said I'm like, I
can't do monogaby, which is like the most scumbag thing
he could possibly say, And it turns out that actually happened.
He yeah, the real if Diego Rivera talked to some
doctor at a party and he was like, yeah, you're
diagnosed as always going to cheat.

Speaker 3 (41:47):
Well, coming at it from a polyamorous standpoint, like, he's
clearly someone who was inclined toward polyamory, and it seems
as though despite Friedo's affairs, seems like she was only
having those because she knew that Diego was in response
to Yeah, exactly. So that's what tends to happen when

(42:10):
a polyamorous person and a monogamous person get together, is
that it doesn't quite work.

Speaker 4 (42:17):
But well, I'm not trying to like make any sort
of disparaging statement towards polyamory, for sure, like Diego Rivera
was an abuser like that.

Speaker 3 (42:27):
Yeah, to be clear, being polyamorous and being an abuser
and a liar and not honoring the type of relationship
your partner wants are two very separate things. And I
don't want to conflate ethical non monogamy with any kind
of partner abuse because there was nothing ethical about what
Diego Rivera was doing in his relationship.

Speaker 5 (42:48):
Yeah, and most relationships at that time in art in
Mexico had that for that. That's why she's so amazing
because she portrayed these personal, very personal pain and suffering
and process. But it was a political statement too, because
she understood power relations and she understood disparity in gender,

(43:12):
and she understood how hurtful a binary system was because
she was also, like you said, very androgenous in some
points of her life. And she understood these things and
she depicts them in her art. And this is amazing,
at least for me, because it's a very weird thing

(43:33):
when the hegemony at the time was these male artists
who painted these murals that represented the official version of
Mexico's history, and they should be doing things that serve
our country, not which was Vasconcelos's this course, the guy
that proposed muralism as our national art, and muralism is

(43:56):
it's like derivera in an art movement, I would say,
like big in the terms of a big figure also
towering over you all the time, also telling you a
version of how you should be, also showcasing everything that
is wrong with the system. And he even included freedom
in one of the paintings. Now it's always her painting

(44:19):
in a private space in a studio on canvas, and
him painting in a public space with the government and everything.
Creating a national basically nationalism, not creating our idea of
what it is to be Mexican. So It's very interesting
for me to see that now the idea of what
it is to be Mexican has more to do with

(44:39):
Freida than with Diego. But it isn't surprising because Flida
showcases a lot of experiences that unfortunately Mexican women have,
and Carlos Moncivice even said that she was kind of
a new version of the Virgin of Galla lupetuous. So
she represents Mexican going both the good than bad things,

(45:03):
better than the Rivera, who was paid to represent Mexico.

Speaker 4 (45:06):
Right, yeah, right, right, so he was always beholden to
somebody else. I'm curious what you both think about this,
because going back and sort of reviewing, how I think
this movie is more political than I was expecting it
to be. Communism was more explicitly addressed than I would

(45:27):
have expected in a mainstream.

Speaker 3 (45:29):
Movie, especially because Hollywood is so afraid of communism historically.

Speaker 4 (45:36):
Right, I mean whatever, It's very like one oh any
kind of stuff. But I felt like the movie kind
of implies that Freda comes by her political beliefs via
Diego Rivera, and that rubbed me the wrong way because
she joined the Communist Party.

Speaker 2 (45:53):
When she was a teenager, like she was really.

Speaker 4 (45:56):
Politically active far before she was like romantically attached to Rivera.
And I felt like the movie kind of suggested that
when she started seeing him after she had gone through
this first recovery, that that was how she arrived at
her political beliefs, and I just it's not true.

Speaker 3 (46:15):
I didn't feel that quite so much, especially because we
see that scene with her on the bus with Diego
Luna's character, that's true, where they're talking about He's like,
you always read things in the wrong order. You have
to read this one guy before you read Mark.

Speaker 5 (46:31):
You have to read Hale before Mark. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (46:34):
Yeah, yeah, I guess I just met like her explicit
connection to the party.

Speaker 5 (46:39):
Yeah yeah. And also, there were twenty five hundred students
in the SCA, which was at the time the only
high school in Mexico, and she was like one of
thirty five women out of those twenty five hundred students,
and she joined the Kachucas, which was a group that
was highly political and Candro, her boyfriend, was one of

(47:02):
the leaders for student autonomy and student movements, which will
eventually have a very dark history in Mexico. So it's
very interesting because she was always involved that she always
was going to end up being a communist. No, right,
So it isn't related to Viego Rivera, I think, and
we shouldn't attribute it to him because also, like I said,

(47:23):
he's not a coherent communist at all.

Speaker 4 (47:26):
He's really bad at being a communist.

Speaker 3 (47:29):
I do think the movie after that scene where she
is discussing like Marxism with Alex, it's almost always us
seeing Diego Rivera talk about his communist ideology, and Frida
we don't see discussed it that much, except for that
one scene where she's they've arrived in New York. She

(47:52):
keeps calling it Gringo Landia, which is very funny. Yeah,
and she's talking about like income disparity and poverty. Aside
from that, her political ideology isn't super clear, and if
it comes up in the movie, it's usually in the
context of what Digo Rivera is doing or what he's
painting or what he's saying.

Speaker 2 (48:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (48:13):
Yeah. And also for that when she was buried, well
not she was, she wasn't buried when it was she
was cremated and the ashes are in the Akasa sut
but when she was in her service, for when she died,
they carried the communist flag to a Yasatats, which is
like the palace of fine arts in Mexico City, and
in her service, the communist flag was carried with her.

(48:37):
So she really really really believed and cared about communism.
And that's what I also find very interesting about how
she has been made into a token for feminism. I
personally I am a feminist and I have been in the
feminist intersectional field in Mexico for more than ten years.

(48:58):
But I always is kind of cringed when they said, ah, yes,
Frida a feminist icon, because when they do that, they
expect then for Freda to be super coherent with feminism.
And then they find out about her relationship with Diriba
and they cancel her and they're like, oh no, But
she allowed herself to be in that relationship and she

(49:19):
helped a man like that exists, and it's like, you
can expect her to be a communist. She understood feminist ideas,
but she never called herself a feminist because that wasn't
even chronologically coherent. And I have seen when I went
to the States one time, at Barnes and Noble, I
saw these set of cards that had like feminist icons

(49:43):
and like Ruthbetter Ginsburg, Frida Calo, Hillary Clinton.

Speaker 4 (49:46):
And I was like, what, right, like the people you
see printed on socks gentrified.

Speaker 3 (49:52):
Areas and you're like, oh, no, she was not.

Speaker 5 (49:56):
She would die if you put her next to Heary Clinton.
Oh my god. Yeah, that's what the America that she
was referring to in her diary, right, So it's no.
And I think that's very interesting how they decided to
pick and choose which part of her rebellion to take,
and they chose those feminist traits and whitewash them, of course,

(50:17):
and this white feminism that you were mentioning, but they
completely left out not in the movie I'm saying, but
in the in how readily is treated by the culture
in Mexico and the United States and other countries mainstream
feminist movement, right. And I think that's interesting.

Speaker 4 (50:35):
Yeah, that's like one of the I feel like many
offshoots of like corporatized feminist discourse that is just like
so aggravating, where it's like, oh, the idea of being
a feminist means that you're a woman who did something successfully, yeah,
and like not even connecting it to any like you're saying,

(50:57):
like a coherent political ideology, like putting those three women
next to each.

Speaker 2 (51:02):
Other, what do they politically have in common?

Speaker 3 (51:05):
So disparate.

Speaker 2 (51:07):
It's really all over the place.

Speaker 4 (51:09):
Yeah, but I will say, like, I do appreciate that
this movie does. I don't know if I'm like grading
it on like a two thousand and two sliding scale
of like it was doing more than I expected it
to politically, although it does feel like politically I think
it did.

Speaker 2 (51:25):
Caitlin, I think like you're saying, make.

Speaker 4 (51:28):
It clear that Diego's communist ideals could be showy versus productive.
I don't think he's held fully to task for that,
but at least it's not presented like they were both,
you know, like incredible and politically flawless.

Speaker 6 (51:44):
Right.

Speaker 4 (51:46):
The other element of Freda's life that I was, well,
I feel like it's complicated by a lot of the
production stories around this movie, which we'll get to because
Samahayak later discusses how Yeah just bullied and harassed she
was by Harvey Weinstein before and throughout the production of

(52:07):
this movie. She spoke about that during the Me Too
movement and has more sense. So this it sucks because
I feel like this particular element of the story is
kind of tainted.

Speaker 2 (52:18):
By those stories.

Speaker 4 (52:20):
But Freda's queerness and a willingness to not just reference
it in passing, which I was kind of wondering at
the beginning, where there is one like affair she's had
with a woman who I guess has also hooked up
with Diego, and it's discussed and there's like a little
handsiness under the table, and I was like, I wonder

(52:41):
if that's all the movie is gonna do in terms
of like referencing that she was famously bisexual or I mean,
it sounds like her sexual identity was like very complicated,
and you know, I doubt she would want to be
put in one particular category.

Speaker 3 (52:57):
That could possibly be true for her gender as well,
especially because I mean, sure I'm speculating here, but you know,
the way she would dress sometimes in men's clothes, possible
that she was gender queer before that was ever an expression,
or perhaps she'd just like to wear men's clothes sometimes

(53:18):
hard to say, but she definitely didn't shy away from
engaging with androgyny totally with her sexuality her queerness.

Speaker 4 (53:27):
Which is like why it's kind of like, I mean,
going back to like the mainstream discourse around her, It's
kind of like, as I was reading through, there's been
so much written about her, obviously, but sort of like
very modern attempts to like retroactively put her in a
box and claim her where It's like, first of all,
you'll never know, and second of all, like that just

(53:47):
seems antithetical to what like how she lived her life
in general.

Speaker 2 (53:52):
Anyways, all I.

Speaker 4 (53:52):
Had to say, I appreciated that they reference that this
fluidity with her sexuality existed throughout her life, and we
see a sex scene with Josephine Baker, and a complicated
part of that is that Harvey Weinstein, I guess, insisted
on that because he wanted Samahayak to appear full frontal

(54:14):
nude in the movie because he was angry throughout the
production that she looked quote unquote too ugly. So that
was like because at first I was like, oh, wow,
it's so rare to see queer sex scenes in a
mainstream movie at all, and then you find out the
reason it's there, and so there's that it's.

Speaker 5 (54:36):
Very sad, Yeah, to find out afterwards.

Speaker 3 (54:39):
Yeah, yeah, I'll share some of the piece that she
wrote in the New York Times.

Speaker 2 (54:46):
Oh Yes, her op.

Speaker 3 (54:48):
Ed yes entitled Harvey Weinstein is My Monster Too, because
this also informs another thing about the movie that I
want to talk about, which is representation of disability. So
first I'll start by sharing a quote from this piece

(55:08):
where she talks about her passion for this project and
her love of Free to Callo. She says, quote, one
of the forces that gave me the determination to pursue
my career was the story of Free to Callo, who,
in the golden age of the Mexican muralists would do small,
intimate paintings that everybody looked down on. She had the

(55:29):
courage to express herself while disregarding skepticism. My greatest ambition
was to tell her story. It became my mission to
portray the life of this extraordinary artist and to show
my native Mexico in a way that combated stereotypes unquote.
So again to showing her appreciation for the subject matter,

(55:49):
her passion for the project. It was like one of
the main things she wanted to do in her career
as an actor, and so with this project she was
passionate about. She took the concept to Harvey Weinstein, who
at the time, she heard good things about as a
film producer. His name came with a level of prestige.

(56:11):
You know, he was known to have made excellent films.
So she went to him, approached him with the project,
and he then started sexually harassing her incessantly. She kept
telling him no, I won't do this, No I won't
do that. No, no, no, and him being told no
enraged him and they entered a legal battle over the movie,

(56:34):
where he named all these stipulations that the only way
that he would proceed with, you know, producing and financing
the movie is if she met these kind of unrealistic
criteria on a really short deadline. But she managed to deliver,
so the movie went forward into production. And then this
is where I'll start quoting from the piece, she says. Quote.

(56:58):
Halfway through shooting, Harvey turned up on the set and
complained about Frieda's unibrow. He insisted that I eliminate the
limp and berated my performance. He then asked everyone in
the room to step out except for me. He told
me that the only thing I had going for me
was my sex appeal and that there was none of
that in this movie. He told me he was going

(57:19):
to shut down the film because no one would want
to see me in that role. It was soul crushing
because I confessed lost in the fog of a sort
of Stockholm syndrome. I wanted him to see me as
an artist, not only as a capable actress, but also
as somebody who could identify a compelling story and had

(57:39):
the vision to tell in an original way, which I
feel like speaks to something that so many women. And
this is me speaking now, I've stopped quoting for a
moment to be clear, but you know it speaks to
something that so many women and people of marginalized genders
deal with as far as imposter syndrome, and goes on

(58:00):
to say quote I was hoping he would acknowledge me
as a producer who, on top of delivering his list
of demands, shepherded the script and obtain the permits to
use the paintings. I had negotiated with the Mexican government
and with whomever I had to to get locations that
had never been given to anyone in the past, including
Freda Collos houses and the mural of Collo's husband Diogoro Vera,

(58:21):
among others. So again, she as a producer did like
all these incredible feats to get this movie made, she says,
but all of this seemed to have no value. The
only thing he noticed was that I was not sexy
in the movie. He made me doubt if I was
any good as an actress, but he never succeeded in
making me think that the film was not worth making.

(58:43):
He offered me one option to continue. He would let
me finish the film if I agreed to do a
sex scene with another woman, and he demanded full frontal nudity.
She goes on to describe the pressure he put on
her and director Julie Taymoor to include this full frontal
nudity sex scene. They felt they had to concede.

Speaker 4 (59:04):
He also, like I think, threatened to fire Julie Taymor
if Samahayak didn't comply with including this scene. Like it
just was like threats to basically sabotage this entire production.
She had spent the better part of ten years trying
to make right happen. And I mean, I feel like
you can attribute so much of how authentic this feels
as opposed to other biopics to the willpower of Samahayak,

(59:29):
and also the fact that she, like you're saying, Caitlin
is a really talented producer.

Speaker 2 (59:34):
Which I feel like is such.

Speaker 4 (59:36):
A double standard in Hollywood in general, where when a male.

Speaker 2 (59:42):
Actor produces his own work, it's.

Speaker 4 (59:44):
Really drawn attention to, but with women it's almost always minimized.

Speaker 5 (59:50):
And the things she got PERMASI for are truly impossible
in Mexico because Frieda and Diego are considered patrimonial artists
and getting permitt for anything related to them is impossible.
So what she did is truly a big fit. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:00:07):
Before I read this piece, I assumed that they had
just built doubles of those sets, not realizing that they
actually like shot on location and yeah, like la asuol
and stuff. Yeah, and then she describes the day that
they shot that sex scene, she had a nervous breakdown.
She was throwing up, she was shaking uncontrollably because she

(01:00:29):
knew she was conceding to the will of this predator
and that's what made her feel so sick.

Speaker 5 (01:00:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:00:36):
He then tried to sabotage the release of the movie
after it was completed. He like didn't want it to
be in theaters really, and.

Speaker 4 (01:00:45):
He sabotaged her Oscar campaign almost wholesale yep.

Speaker 3 (01:00:49):
So, and then the piece concludes with Somemahaik talking about
women being devalued and undervalued as artists and filmmakers and she,
you know, longs for gender equity in Hollywood. So a
piece worth reading if any listeners want to learn more,
but truly sickening to be reminded of all the horrors

(01:01:11):
that Harvey Weinstein puts so many people through.

Speaker 5 (01:01:13):
I think it's very sad and kind of meta that
they're making a film about free that but also about
her abuser and this horrible person that controlled the art
world in Mexico. And I find a lot of parallel
lines between Harvey Weinstein's figure and the Rivera's figure in

(01:01:35):
the making of the movie and in the story that
they're telling. So it's so sad that it's so contradictory,
know that they're telling this story and it happens on set, yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:01:45):
Right, all while scaling back the abusive nature of the
other person. Like I just wanted to add as a
I guess like punctuation on that that. Alfred Melina also
did interviews around this time, and also before hating Harvey Weinstein, before.

Speaker 2 (01:02:01):
It was cool.

Speaker 4 (01:02:02):
He's a real one he is, Yeah, but they he
sort of expanded on how Weinstein, when he was not
successful in getting Samahayak to creatively compromise, started talking to
other actors to see if he could turn them against her,
including going over like trying to basically get Alfred Malina
on his side and being like, she's one of the
best actors in the world, and what do I see

(01:02:24):
on screen? Nothing but Freeda. Molina expressed disbelief. Well, that's
the whole fucking point, isn't it. He's me like, which
like yeah, And then sort of subsequently for the amount
of time Weinstein had power after that was Black Belt
by Miramax.

Speaker 2 (01:02:44):
Yeah, but I.

Speaker 4 (01:02:46):
Mean it's just it's so I mean, it's like a
story we're very familiar with now, but just hearing how
how hard Salmahayak had to work to even get this
in production because looking at the Freedom movies that almost
happened and thankfully didn't one with Jailo with Jelo, but
also the biography by Hayden Herrera was first optioned in

(01:03:09):
nineteen eighty eight, and they wanted to have either Meryl
Streep or Jessica Lang played Frieda or you Madonna almost
played Frieda with Robert de Niro starring as Diego Rivera,
and you're like, no offense for Robert Nio, but like,
there's a whole there's so many reasons for him not
to play Diego Rivera.

Speaker 2 (01:03:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:03:29):
So the fact that this movie that Samahiak's production is
the one that prevailed is amazing.

Speaker 5 (01:03:36):
Yeah, with a Mexican woman as a lead from Quatsa
qual Cosbera Cruz who came up through a telenovela SI
stem in Mexico and ended up in Hollywood. No, So
that's also something that I found very valuable about. I
love Salama Kayak, of course, and I think that that's
why she's so aware of the fact that what Harvey

(01:03:57):
Weinstein did to her, because it's very colmon here in
Mexico in the telenovela system too. So I don't think
unfortunately it was the first time she encountered these predators
in her job. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:04:09):
I read an interview she did in twenty twenty one
that sort of followed up on the op ed you
read us Passages from Caitlin, where Yeah, she basically confirms
that she's like, I don't mean to minimize my experiences
with Weinstein. They were very traumatic, but that had already
happened to me so frequently that I almost like tried

(01:04:29):
to take it in stride at the time, because it
was just how I was conditioned to believe things were
going to work, no matter where I was working or
at what level, which is miserable.

Speaker 3 (01:04:42):
Yes, indeed, I wanted to touch on the other thing that
the piece alludes to, as far as like compromises that
she felt she had to make in order to appease
this monster of a person, as far as is the
representation of disability where Frida Collo dealt with chronic pain.

(01:05:05):
She had many surgeries throughout her life, she had a miscarriage,
and the movie You Know examines how this inspires some
of her artwork. But it seems like the movie attributes
all of this to the bus accident that we see
happening on screen, which he sent through.

Speaker 5 (01:05:23):
Ye right.

Speaker 3 (01:05:24):
The movie does not mention that she had polio as
a child, I believe when she was six years old,
which caused leg pain and for her to have a
limp when she walked even before the bus accident. And
I saw criticism that the movie tends to downplay and
erase Freda's physical disability. This could be because Freda is

(01:05:50):
played by an able bodied actor, but I read a
piece from a writer who is disabled named Marta Russell,
who took issue with the disability rature, particularly the scene
where Frida is doing that seductive dance with Ashley Judd's character.
The movie depicts her in you know, high heels dancing.

(01:06:12):
There's no visible limp, but the real life Frieda wore
several layers of socks on her right shoe that was
also like build up to compensate for her smaller limb.
Her right leg was was it her right le? One
of her legs was considerably smaller and weaker because of

(01:06:33):
the polio, I believe, or maybe it was a combination
of the polio and the bus accident.

Speaker 5 (01:06:38):
There was another thing, m There are historians who believe
that the polio diagnosis was kind of invented by her
family because it was a how do you see in
English congenital disease. Congenital congenital disease called spina bifida spleet
spine that her and her siblings all had, and it's

(01:07:01):
proven she had a little brother that was born and
died as a little baby named Guillermo, and they all
had disability. And what is interesting is that like historians
that have worked with Freda in their careers have discussed
about this topic and so why would the family decide
to say it's polio? And it also has to do

(01:07:21):
with the fact that all the siblings had this diagnosis
of spineappifida. And what is interesting about this is that
they also proposed the idea that Frida didn't only have
a miscarriage, she had two abortions. No, and many believed
that she did because she was scared of passing down
that condition to her children. So it's that's why they

(01:07:46):
tend to believe that there's like weird thing there that
we don't know about with the where the family said
something and then Frida behaved towards it. But also Frida
had a very internalized ablest attitude against herself. They say
that the way she dressed, even the one a skirts

(01:08:08):
that she wore and the outfits that she were, especially
later running her life when she encountered the biggest tissues
and complications, they hit her disability with her legs. So
it's very interesting to notice how everything that we know
about her disability is kind of contradicting each other's versions
of the facts. And I found that very interesting because

(01:08:30):
it tells you how it's invisibilized, not like the movie does.
And it's also something that hasn't been researched as other
aspects of her life. And we don't know an official
version of the facts. So why do I suddenly find
out that all of her siblings had this same disease

(01:08:54):
and so on and so forth.

Speaker 3 (01:08:55):
No, Right, So, even though we might not know exactly
what the specifics were of her source of pain and disability,
we do know that she did deal with chronic pain
and again walked with a limp. And the movie more
or less erases that it's very inconsistent. But then you

(01:09:18):
find out why, Yeah, because apparently Harvey Weinstein insisted that
was the case, or to be.

Speaker 5 (01:09:25):
Sixy Yeah, and just the fact from what I was
saying that I forgot to say. They say that she
couldn't walk at three years old, for example. Oh, so
that's why they believe it second genital disease and not
so much something she contracted later.

Speaker 4 (01:09:40):
I see, Yeah, it's so I'm willing to find this
wholesale on Harvey Weinstein.

Speaker 2 (01:09:48):
Yeah, but maybe that's just the easiest answer.

Speaker 4 (01:09:51):
I do think that this also like connecting with what
you're both saying, there is such a resistance to depicting
and especially responsibly depicting disability.

Speaker 2 (01:10:01):
And then the further.

Speaker 4 (01:10:02):
Back you go, especially if you're doing a historical piece,
the harder it is to sort of parse out how
disability was spoken about or not spoken about then versus now.
So it's like a very I mean, as disability advocates know,
it's a very very difficult needle to thread, and it
just seems like the only thing that is certain is that,

(01:10:23):
because of how this production was being controlled, this was
not a production that was going to handle the issue
of disability responsibly.

Speaker 5 (01:10:33):
Yeah, it's very sad. It is because also Frida didn't.
I mean, it's a whole conversation about why would disability
make someone vulnerable on this ableist world, how it's built
in enablest manner and everything. But Frida also didn't want
to look vulnerable against the world. No, and that's why

(01:10:54):
she herself didn't want to accepting her paintings, of course,
but in her because when you see pictures of her
in everyday life. She was performing all the time, her outfits,
her whole esthetic, how she dressed. It was like performance art.

Speaker 4 (01:11:12):
It reminded me of I feel like again, just like
how at least how my art education was, because I
was not an art major or anything like that. But
I feel like it's often presented in contemporary classes, like
Cindy Sherman was the first artist to ever do that,
And you're like, but that's so clearly what Frida is doing. Yeah,
she's presenting herself in all these different ways and in characters,
and like, it's just it's amazing.

Speaker 5 (01:11:34):
And Cindy Sherman does it in her pictures, but Villa
Cala didn't her everyday life. No, And it's very very
interesting because she had a whole persona that she embodied
every time that she was out in public, or she
was having a party in her house, or and it
had to do with a very particular set of tools

(01:11:54):
that she had developed because of her queerness, because of
her disability, because of the chata just she had encountered
throughout her life. And I think it's nowadays it's one
of the most appropriated parts of Frida Carlo that the
braids and the rebon in her hair and the Mexican attire,
like stereotypically Mexican and all of that, and it's part

(01:12:17):
of what she did to both conceal her insecurities and
also showcase herself as whatever she wanted to do, and
that was shown in her attire.

Speaker 4 (01:12:29):
I think, yeah, this movie does adequately show that Freda
color is really cool, but never enough. It feels like
I wanted to acknowledge something that I don't know how
to address. I was going back in because I've seen
it referenced over the years of casting for this movie.
Because Alfred Molina is a white guy, he is of

(01:12:53):
Spanish and Italian descent, and so there has been a
fair amount of criticism around his casting. The complicating factor
there is that Selma Jyak directly asked him to play
the part, and like went to his play and was like,
you're the guy, and I guess, like, you don't say
no to Selma Jyak, And I don't know, because I

(01:13:14):
was looking into Dico Rivera's background and he is also
very multicultural but also very Mexican.

Speaker 2 (01:13:20):
So it's just yeah, I mean, it doesn't.

Speaker 4 (01:13:23):
Seem like if this movie was being made today that
Alfred Molina would be the right choice for this part.
But yeah, I just saw a lot of conversation around
it then and now I saw a red carpet interview
with him at the premiere of this movie, and him
addressing the criticism and being like, there's no doubt, like

(01:13:44):
I am of Spanish Italian descent, and there are a
lot of people in Mexico who were upset that I
had been cast, and I understand why, which then leads
to the question.

Speaker 2 (01:13:55):
Well, then why did you do it?

Speaker 4 (01:13:58):
But I just wanted to acknowledge that as well, because
it feels like something that's frequently cited in this movie,
and also just throughout Alfred Molina's career, he's been cast.
I mean, I think of his role in Indiana Jones
as kind of another example of this.

Speaker 3 (01:14:14):
Yeah, He's definitely played characters of ethnic backgrounds that are
certainly not his own.

Speaker 4 (01:14:21):
Yeah, I mean, and I'm the last person to want
to bring down the hammer on our boy, but I
still acknowledge that. I want to seem like I was
not willing to engage with that discussion just because it
was Alfred Polina.

Speaker 5 (01:14:34):
I relate that also to some recent criticism I have
seen against Rida Calo herself, no, that she really portrayed
herself as these indigenous Mexican women, especially towards her adult years.
And lasos Fridas, of course has the European Frieda and

(01:14:56):
the Mexican Frieda depicted there. But her dad was German, No,
and her mom was well, her grandfather from her mom's
side was an indigenous man, but her grandmother from her
mom's side was a Spanish descent also, and almost all
Mexicans we have this complex mixture of ethnicities and races

(01:15:19):
and backgrounds. So it would be very hard to cast
someone that is perfect for the egorrita because our history
in Mexico comes from and I'm not saying that's something
good that happened. It's the invasion of Mexican by the
Spanish was basically and the creation of the Mestizo race,

(01:15:41):
which is the mixture of indigenous and white Spanish people,
is basically the rape of thousands of Mexican original community women.
But this is something that Frila Calo has also been
accused of doing, of appropriating cultures that are not her
and stuff like that, and I think that's a very

(01:16:02):
complex discussion. Now. The other day, I was teaching cultural
appropriation with my students and they were like, but when
when is it appreciation and when is it appropriation? And
they were telling me examples, and I was like, it's
very hard. We have to contextualize every single example to
understand what happens there. Not because some may say I

(01:16:23):
freely doesn't have any right to portray indigenous experiences in
her art, but also her grandfather was from indigenous assent,
and you know, Alfred Molina, I think has the same thing.
He comes from a Spanish Italian background. He's not Mexican.
Diria was. But Mexican is not a race or an ethnicity,

(01:16:45):
it's a nationality.

Speaker 4 (01:16:47):
So yeah, and that was why I felt naive when
I was looking into this, because I feel like i'd
seen it presented like you're talking about the same way
that I saw a lot of I feel like it
was like ten years ago or so. There was just
like this wave of criticism that's exactly what you're.

Speaker 2 (01:17:01):
Describing about free to callow.

Speaker 4 (01:17:02):
And then a piece that I we can link it
in the description of this, but I read a piece
by Tanya Nunez who wrote a whole essay basically saying
what you just said, Angela, whereas like.

Speaker 2 (01:17:14):
Well it's not that simple.

Speaker 4 (01:17:15):
And you know, even if there were contemporary criticisms, if
free to Callo was working today, she wasn't. Those weren't
the conversations going on then, and during her lifetime, she
was largely not trying to profit off of this.

Speaker 5 (01:17:30):
Yeah, she only sold one painting, which was the two
Freedas for two hundred and fifty dollars ry. No, she
only had one solo exhibition, which was the one that
picked her in the movie. The other exhibitions were with
other artists, so she didn't really profit. She was Diego's
wife most of the time for the public, right, unfortunately.

Speaker 4 (01:17:50):
And it's like a conversation she's mostly having with herself
throughout her life and like trying to understand her identity
and then looking into Diego's background. Yeah, it says on
scholarly journal Wikipedia it says Diego was of Spanish, Americandian, African, Italian, Jewish, Russian,
and Portuguese descent.

Speaker 2 (01:18:07):
So it's just like, yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 5 (01:18:10):
Yeah, that's what happens with the American continent.

Speaker 3 (01:18:13):
No, yeah, yeah, and I think that's the I mean,
this is something I have spent a lot of time
and effort learning slash unlearning as far as because I
think a lot of white Americans do view being Mexican
as a racial identity. Yeah, and I've heard people be like, oh, no,

(01:18:36):
he's not white, he's Mexican. It's like, well, that does
not preclude him, Like he could still be a white Mexican.

Speaker 5 (01:18:42):
Yeah. I'm white as folk, and I'm Mexican because my
daddy's from Spain and my mom's sambili is from Spain too,
and I have a Mexican nationality. It doesn't mean anything, no.

Speaker 3 (01:18:53):
Right, right. So there's a lot of I think still
to this day, misunderstanding about the difference between like the
ethnic and national and racial background of everyone in Latin America.
And there's so much erasure also of Afro Latin X people.
Of course, there's so much erasure of indigenous people who

(01:19:14):
were the original inhabitants of what would become known as
Latin America. And it's such a fraud history with colonization
and the Transatlantic slave trade. It has created a lot
of confusion for a lot of people. And so it's
something that I think we've gotten wrong on the podcast

(01:19:34):
before and.

Speaker 5 (01:19:35):
For sure, and it has to do with what Riverta did.
He created this Mexican nationalism that makes you believe that
we are a race they said, the say the Bronze race,
that it comes from that glorious indigenous past, from the
Mechicas and all of these pre Hispanic civilizations that emulates

(01:19:57):
how Europe treated the Greeks and the Romans. That's what
Basco Clos and the muralist projected here in Mexico. But
at the same time, governments mistreat alive indigenous people who
are living in our world today, you know. So it's
a it's an issue, and Dio Riverta was a very
big participant in that. And this idea, the stereotype of

(01:20:19):
what it is to be Mexican is also created by
our own nationalism and how we portray ourselves to the world.

Speaker 3 (01:20:25):
So yeah, Tangled Web, I mean, I've spoken to Mexican
American people who are racially white who have said I'm
not white, I'm Mexican.

Speaker 5 (01:20:37):
No. And we even have a term in Mexico called
white Secans, which are the white Mexicans that are middle
high class people that behave like assholes to towards everyone,
and they believe that they're superior and this systemic and
super super rooted racism we have in Mexico and classism

(01:20:58):
and everything, and there's the white secun label. And once
I had a student that's me, future are white secut
and I was like, well, yeah, I'm white and I'm Mexican.
I hope I don't behave like a serty people white secun.

Speaker 3 (01:21:12):
But yeah, yeah, yeah, for people in the US especially,
it's it is, we're just like severely under educated about it,
Like it's embarrassing. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:21:25):
With regard to just like closing the loop on the
Alpha Molina thing, it was tricky because it involved digging
up two thousand and two media, which is either hard
to find or kind of inscrutable when you read it.
It just seemed like they're two separate strains of criticism
going on, one being that Alpha Blina is white and

(01:21:47):
the other just that he had no connection to Mexican culture,
and that because Diego Rivera was such a prominent Mexican
figure that they were like, well, why this, why do we.

Speaker 2 (01:21:59):
Have this British like that?

Speaker 4 (01:22:01):
Yeah, which is I think a fair criticism, And I
also think he gives a great performance because it's South
for Bolina is a star.

Speaker 5 (01:22:09):
He's amazing. I have something to say about this because
there is a part of the film where they a
trotsky and Frida paints it to Frida's there is a
woman singing do you remember like yourna? Yes, yes, that
woman who appears in the movie. She is created as
Lapelona and Death. No, she plays death which we call

(01:22:31):
lapelona sometimes. That woman is famous for singing that song.
Her name is Celle la Varagas, and cevel la Vargas
is from Costa Rica. But she said that famous quote
that says los Mexicano that means Mexicans are born wherever
they fucking want. This is because she is considered Mexican

(01:22:54):
and an icon for Mexican culture, but she wasn't born
in Mexico. And Chaveel la Vargas is also related to
the queerness of in the film. This is a very
like nice detail in my opinion, because tavel la Baga
is that old lady that you see in the movie,
is actually someone who had a relationship with Frida. Oh oh,
they had a very passionate affair. And Chavelas appears in

(01:23:20):
Frida's movie Singing too, San Maachayek portraying Frida No, and yeah, yeah,
it's it's incredible because if you don't know this nice story,
you wouldn't know. That's another way that they introduced free
theat Aquaerness by bringing one of her, the actual person
that she had an affair with, into the film. Yeah, yeah,

(01:23:44):
so cool.

Speaker 4 (01:23:45):
Oh gosh, that's just like such a w to make
a cameo in your lover's biopic, Like really good stuff.
That's I didn't know that. That's really cool.

Speaker 5 (01:23:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:23:57):
Well, I think an extension of the conversation of cast
in this movie can extend to the crew as far
as like, why did a white woman from the US
who is not Mexican or Latina? Why was she the
one hired to direct this movie? Right?

Speaker 2 (01:24:15):
Why was it a majority white writers? Including Diane Lake?
By the way, what was she doing here?

Speaker 3 (01:24:22):
Sworn enemy of Jamie She's my new enemy. Yes, yes,
I saw that and like IMDb and I read it
really quickly, and I thought it said Diane Lane. I
was like, oh, wow, is Diane Lane a screenwriter? But
then it's a slightly different is it?

Speaker 4 (01:24:39):
Fred Callos super fan, No I wish instead it's my
sworn enemy who gave you a C because I was
late to class too many times.

Speaker 2 (01:24:49):
Grow up?

Speaker 3 (01:24:50):
You know what? Lateness is just a construct invented by
capitalism exactly.

Speaker 4 (01:24:56):
Lateness is on timeness leaving the body. And I don't
I don't care for this. There was one writer, one
credited writer because also it is said that Edward Norton
worked on the screenplay but was not credited as a
writer for like WGA reasons. But there was one writer
of Mexican descent who worked on the screenplay, Gregory Nava,

(01:25:20):
who had worked on a number of movies prior. He
also directed Selena, the Jlo Celena movie. Oh yes, anyways,
from what we can tell. And also it's always so
inscrutable because the ways that movie writing credits happen, who knows.

(01:25:42):
But yes, it seems like there was only one Mexican
writer involved in the writing of this movie, although there
was one famous communist writer involved, which maybe is attributable
to how political this movie did get. In the script
where clans I recog it is his name, and I
was like why because I went into a big blacklist

(01:26:05):
research hole and I wonder why. But Anyways, he was
a screenwriter who was called in and subpoenaed by the
House Committee of on American Activity. Is he was a
card carrier communist and it seems like just generally a
real one from what I can tell.

Speaker 2 (01:26:24):
So yeah, and then Diane Link Boom, and then.

Speaker 4 (01:26:27):
She's she worked on it as well, and it's her
only screenwriting credit, her other credit disrespecting me.

Speaker 3 (01:26:35):
I call that a discredit.

Speaker 2 (01:26:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:26:38):
Yeah. What I was telling Kaitling during the break is
that the DP the cinematographer uses who is Yeah, he's
an amazing and amazing cinematographer who is Mexican. So and
I also when I saw the credits, I really saw

(01:26:58):
a bad lance between male and female crew, which I enjoyed.
I don't know their backgrounds, but I don't see that
very often, so I was happy about it.

Speaker 2 (01:27:09):
Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 3 (01:27:11):
Yeah, I mean, especially at the top. It is largely
a woman driven movie as far as the director, half
of the writers, Selma Hayek producing, and.

Speaker 4 (01:27:22):
I do feel like when women are producing their own projects,
you tend to see more gender parody in the cruise,
which is just another way of saying you have to
have representation at every level.

Speaker 2 (01:27:34):
Of production of course.

Speaker 4 (01:27:35):
Yeah, we were talking about Rodriguo Prieto, I think quite
a bit earlier this year, because he just had like
the wildest last year where he was the cinematographer for
both Barbie and Killers of the Flower Moon, which is
just like the range, the range this man has. I mean,
his resume is wild. The same year he did Frida,

(01:27:58):
he also did eight Mile. He's got range with I mean,
he loves to do a totally different movie.

Speaker 5 (01:28:06):
Yeah. He also, like I told Caitlin, I'm a swiftly
so I love him because she he directed all of
my favorite videos recently. Really yeah, I didn't he was
sweet Taylor.

Speaker 4 (01:28:18):
Yeah, wow, oh my god, wait, so many twists in turns.
I knew that, like because he's like Martin Scorsese and
Julie Taymore and I think Inatu's go to guy.

Speaker 3 (01:28:29):
Like oh right, we were talking about it because he
shot Wolf of wall Street in Robbie's first major role,
and then shot her whatever ten years later as Barbie.

Speaker 2 (01:28:43):
As a sorry for shooting you that way and wolf
of yeah gesture.

Speaker 4 (01:28:48):
Now he literally directed the Cardigan there, wow.

Speaker 5 (01:28:52):
Cardian Fortnight. Yeah. She also works with another Cinemata refer
who's a woman. Yeah, I think he's her Nay, but
she also works with Rodrio Prito, so I am very proud.

Speaker 2 (01:29:06):
Of them every time.

Speaker 4 (01:29:08):
Wow, this is a fun recur He's a fun recurring
Bachtel cast character because every time I learned something new
about him, it is completely unexpected and fascinating.

Speaker 3 (01:29:17):
And he did a great job with this movie. It
looks so cool.

Speaker 2 (01:29:19):
It's beautiful.

Speaker 5 (01:29:21):
Yeah, yeah, it's so pretty, the colors.

Speaker 4 (01:29:23):
And I just love the idea of him going back
to his hotel room at the end of the day
of shooting on Frida and answering an email about eight
miles like, yeah, yeah, he opened up his hotmail dot
com two thousand and two web book or palm pilot
or whatever the fuck you were using then, So, does.

Speaker 3 (01:29:44):
Anyone have anything else to discuss?

Speaker 5 (01:29:49):
Oh, I have my notes with Osama we say in Spanish,
and I take notes of everything when I get excited.

Speaker 3 (01:29:57):
But oh, I have pages of notes.

Speaker 2 (01:29:59):
You're in good comfort.

Speaker 5 (01:30:00):
Yeah, yeah. Just what I think is very nice about
the movie is also they don't portray the art as
much as we wanted them to do. No, as Jamie
think was mentioning earlier on but what I like is
that they really create these life paintings and free the

(01:30:22):
an aesthetic at the end of her life that came
from what we call in Mexico exbotos. Exbotos are little
paintings made in rural Mexico, in outside of Mexico City.
People are very Catholic, especially in those places, and when
something happens to them, they pray for it to get better. Know,

(01:30:43):
something bad happens, they pray for it to get better.
So what they do is that they go to the
town's painter, and the painter ask them what the event was,
who are they praying to, what saint and who is
this being dedicated to? Know, So it has a format
and it's text an image of the event. And then

(01:31:05):
what they do with those little paintings is that they
hang them at the church. And after they leave the church,
and after they have asked for help from this saint,
they have to move on and carry on with their lives. Know.
And Frida, I think, and this was said by Marta Samora,
who was a biographer of Frida, how Frida took this

(01:31:26):
idea of expotos and put it in her painting. And
I think that's very nice because it's something very niche
of Mexico and that most people from other countries don't know.
But if they look at afrida color of painting and
they look at an expoto, they will see the similarities.
And Frida did this to survive. Basically, she wanted to
create these paintings that looked like exbotos and she carried

(01:31:49):
out that in her life. She painted with all her
pain and her suffering in the canvas and this personal
and political intersection that she was so good at the
and she was the only one at the time that
did it as well as that, and then she carried
on with her life.

Speaker 3 (01:32:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:32:08):
So it's amazing because we see her in the movie
having fun. I mean, of course this in the civilization
of the disability is not good, but she has fun.
We also see her in other aspects now, her alcoholism,
her addiction to paint bills. But Frida tried to carry
on despite all of the things that went on. And

(01:32:31):
I don't think it has to do with this saving
race or trying to get rid of the idea of
suffering and pain. But because she was a rebel at
the end of the.

Speaker 3 (01:32:41):
Day, yeh, I do appreciate the movie contextualizing where some
of her inspiration comes from and her paintings like something
will happen and then you see it inspire one or
several of her works of art. My main thing is like,
I just feel like the relationship between her and Diego

(01:33:01):
Rivera takes up too much narrative real estate.

Speaker 4 (01:33:04):
Which seems to be the through line with how most
of the adaptations of her life in fiction like She's
I feel like still too frequently presented as equally built.

Speaker 2 (01:33:15):
With because I feel like this movie is called.

Speaker 4 (01:33:16):
Frieda, but it could easily be called Frieda and Diego
and yeah, yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:33:20):
Exactly right. And they wanted to be separated at the
end of their when in their second marriage they had
the house created by Juana Gorman in Sananjel that were
two houses again goals, yeah, goals, And she didn't even
live there for that long because her dad got sick
and she went to La Casasoul and they lived separate

(01:33:42):
lives at the end. So I don't think they wanted
to be seen as an item, and they were seen
as an item all throughout their relationship, so at least
Frida as an art historian, of course I'm biased, but
I would have liked to see her creative process a
bit more same. Yeah, how did she know which colors

(01:34:03):
to use? How did she decide the size of the painting?
How did she come up with a little girl with
the skull face, the watermelons, not all of those things?
How did she decide to do that? I would have
liked to see the creative process come to life instead
of just being the end result of the painting exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:34:23):
I agree.

Speaker 4 (01:34:23):
I feel like this is something I've noticed in biopics
about women again, specifically where it's just like there's always
less focus on process when the story is about a woman.
I think because I think about like biopics of the
last couple of years, Oppenheimer immediately comes to mind, where

(01:34:44):
there are very sort of like magical, you know, sort
of the sequences about and then he's scienced or whatever,
but there is also sequences where you're explained like this
is the process, this is how he gets there.

Speaker 2 (01:34:58):
And I feel like even with movies about.

Speaker 4 (01:35:00):
Male artist, there is just inherently more of a focus
on process. And I'm not upset that there's a focus
on process, but that should be something that is like
across the board available to any exceptional person exactly, like
why would you not want to know how the sausage
is made?

Speaker 5 (01:35:15):
And it's not very obvious if you don't know, for example,
that Frida had this obsession with mirrors or with death,
it's not very obvious. I mean it's in the film
language now that at the beginning she starts looking at
herself in the mirror and that's how the movie begins.
But she truly had an obsession with looking at herself
and with time passing because she spends so much time

(01:35:36):
in bed with death. She wanted to die at the
end of her life so bad, and when she did,
she was very happy. Her last drawing said that, No,
so everything that I think I would have liked to see,
how do you become Frida Calo as an artist? Because
as a person, I think it's clear some things missing,

(01:36:00):
like with this ghost. But as an artist, how did
she find that particular esthetic that is so divisive because
people either love her or hate her, but it causes
an impact, And how did she find that? I would
have loved to see that in the movie.

Speaker 4 (01:36:17):
Yeah, yeah, I agree. I also in the like mainstream feminist.

Speaker 2 (01:36:22):
Capitalistic way. I literally it was really annoying.

Speaker 4 (01:36:26):
I saw like a modern defection of free to call it,
where it's like free to caller, queen of the selfie.

Speaker 2 (01:36:32):
And you're like, no, we're like it's.

Speaker 4 (01:36:36):
Like patronizing, right, Like we're I don't know. All of
her work is like you have to be having three
or four conversations that wants to really talk about it
and seeing people sort of cherry pick the part of
her work that they resonate with and then ignoring the
political aspect, ignoring the identity aspect, because so much of

(01:36:56):
Freda's work was connected to her connections to my Mexico
and like understanding what her identity was across time, and
like it's just irritating.

Speaker 5 (01:37:07):
Only Frida could have done that, like putting such universal
feelings like pain, the fear of abandonment, the fear of
a miscarriage, all of those things she had depicted, but
intersecting it with politics. She was a genius for that.

Speaker 4 (01:37:23):
Yes, it's awesome, and I mean the fact that so
many people can miss it maybe is just like speaks
to how complicated the work is. But it's also like,
just read a little bit.

Speaker 3 (01:37:34):
I want to share a quote from her. I think
this is something she said later in her life, but
just kind of tying it back to the things that
inspired her art, and the movie skimming over her political ideology,
not ignoring it or erasing it, but like again, focusing
way more on Diego Rivera's politics than Frida's. But she said, quote,

(01:37:59):
I have a great restlessness about my paintings, mainly because
I want to make it useful to the revolutionary communist movement.
Until now I have managed simply an honest expression of
my own self. I must struggle with all my strength
to ensure that the little positive my health allows me
to do also benefits the revolution, the only real reason

(01:38:22):
to live unquote obviously translated from Spanish. So she was like,
my work means nothing unless I'm moving the communist movement forward,
is how she felt. I think later in life, and
maybe also earlier, but yeah, yeah, I feel like I'm like,
can we get a little more sense of that in
the movie, please.

Speaker 4 (01:38:43):
I think the last thing I had that I just
wanted to say, like I was glad was reflected in
the movie was that even though the movie, as we've
all said, is sort of unduly focused on Diego as well,
I did like that we see that friendship between Frida
and Lupe develop and that you get real moments, because

(01:39:06):
I feel like, again I was like a little bit
like oh no, Weinstein production when Lupe makes the scene
at their wedding and You're just like, okay, is she
just gonna be presented as irrational?

Speaker 2 (01:39:17):
And but I thought that the.

Speaker 4 (01:39:18):
Way that played out for you know, big Hollywood movie
was more nuanced and thoughtful than I thought it would be,
and seems to be at least the friendship is like
reflective of their actual experience. And then a relationship I
wish I had seen more of was between Frieda and Christina,
because it seems like her relationship with Christina was very

(01:39:41):
dominant in her life, and it is true that Diego
had an affair with her sister. But again, I feel
like the movie defers to how does Freeda feel about
that in relation to Diego and doesn't really like it
seems like most of the progress in the relationship with
her and her sister takes place offic screen, which I

(01:40:01):
don't know, I'm nipicking at this point, but it would
have been nice to see the relationships that we know
were very significant to free to, you know, proportionally reflected
in the movie instead of just going back to Diego
all the time.

Speaker 5 (01:40:14):
Heard that too, Yes, because she learned how to position
people in a painting from her dad being a photographer,
and her dad was a very successful photographer during the Porfiliato,
which was a dictatorship regime we had before the Mexican
Revolution and after her dad had a lot of problems
because of the revolution, and the Mexican Revolution was based

(01:40:36):
on the freedom at least one part, on the freedom
of indigenous people and their land being returned to them,
and well that was happening. The gorilla was in Paris
learning how to paint. So it's so, it's how I
would have also liked to see the context because Mexico
at that time was chaotics, like very chaotic. We had

(01:41:01):
just gone through a civil war, and I would have
liked to see how that context affected freedom. Her family,
being a bourgeois, very high class European who profited from
the regime before the revolution, what that did to her life,
and why that radicalizes her into communism too, So I

(01:41:21):
would have liked to see that.

Speaker 4 (01:41:23):
Yeah, she you know, would frequently kind of fudge the
year she was born to line up with the year
that the revolution started nineteen ten. Yeah, like connect her
identity to like I am a born revolutionary.

Speaker 3 (01:41:37):
Yeah, and that she would kind of erase her background
coming from a like well to do family.

Speaker 4 (01:41:44):
Yeah, which Diego Rivera was also from a pretty yeah
wealthy family as well.

Speaker 5 (01:41:49):
Yeah, that's why he could study art no and not.

Speaker 2 (01:41:52):
Right fuck after France for a couple of years.

Speaker 5 (01:41:55):
Yeah, and didn't become a soldier is one of the
factions of the revolution.

Speaker 3 (01:41:58):
Yeahm hmmm. All this to say, I feel like Frida's
life deserves a whole series rather than just a two
hour film. So if we ever see any more like
kind of biographical stories about her on the screen, it
should be a long TV series because there's just so

(01:42:21):
much well speaking to her relationships with the women in
her life that the movie kind of touches on but
could have examined more the Bechdel test. The movie does pass,
I mean.

Speaker 4 (01:42:38):
Not as much as you would like it too for
a biopic about women that had a lot of women
who were important in her life.

Speaker 2 (01:42:46):
Yeah, but it does.

Speaker 3 (01:42:48):
But then she does talk to Alfred Molina a lot
and to the Bye Laws of the Bechdel cast.

Speaker 2 (01:42:55):
I forgot my own role.

Speaker 3 (01:42:56):
You know, people of marginalized genders. Speaking to Alred Molina
about Alfred Bina is an automatic.

Speaker 5 (01:43:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:43:05):
Yeah, so in that way, it's actually kind of unprecedented.

Speaker 5 (01:43:08):
You have converted me to Alfred Morina fans.

Speaker 4 (01:43:13):
Yes, well, you you've joined an elite group because Alfred
Molina is a past guest.

Speaker 2 (01:43:18):
Of this show. Yeah. Oh my. We still don't know
how we pulled it off.

Speaker 3 (01:43:23):
We don't have to know, but we talked about Aaron Brockovich.

Speaker 5 (01:43:26):
Oh I love that movie.

Speaker 4 (01:43:28):
He's wow, that's amazing. You're amazing, King, He's amazing. I
love to praise this man on our phone show. But yes,
it does pass the actual test, but I do feel
like I wish.

Speaker 2 (01:43:46):
It did more more. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:43:49):
As far as our metric, the Nipple scale scale, where
we rate the movie zero to five nipples based on
examining it through an intersectional Felm and this lens, I'm
inclined to give it maybe like a three point five.
I do wish that, you know, for a movie called

(01:44:11):
freeda that is allegedly about her life, and the main
thing we know about her life is that she was
an artist, like you know, as a public figure. If
someone's like, who's Free to Callo, You're like, oh, an
artist And for us to not see as much as
you would think we would about her artistic process, more

(01:44:31):
about her inspirations, so much narrative real estate going to
her relationship with Diego Rivera, And yes, that was an
important relationship in her life. But I feel like we
end up learning more about Diego Rivera than we do
about Free to Callo and her backstory and her political
ideologies and her identity and all this stuff. So wish

(01:44:54):
the movie had focused a bit more on Freeda.

Speaker 2 (01:44:58):
Doesn't feel like too much to ask.

Speaker 3 (01:45:01):
It doesn't, but I do. I do appreciate that. Again,
for a movie from two thousand and two, which was, like,
you know, a Hollywood produced movie, I assumed that so
much of her, especially her queerness and her communist ideology,
would have been erased or really really downplayed, maybe only

(01:45:23):
mentioned in passing but never shown on screen. But like,
you have three different romantic or sexual moments between her
and another woman in the movie. One of them carries
a lot of baggage because it was basically forced to
exist by Harvey Weinstein, but the benefit of it is
that you do see this like steamy, perhaps exploitative, but

(01:45:47):
I know it.

Speaker 4 (01:45:47):
It's like knowing that Salma Hayek felt ill the day
that has happened.

Speaker 2 (01:45:51):
I just it.

Speaker 4 (01:45:52):
I Ugh, Yeah, Harvey Weinstein can't suffer enough.

Speaker 2 (01:45:57):
As far as I'm concerned.

Speaker 3 (01:45:58):
No rot in hell, but the fact that there is,
because in two thousand and two it was very hard
to find even if there were queer characters, we wouldn't
see any type of like kissing between two women or
kissing betraying men or anything like that. It is a
relief to see that.

Speaker 2 (01:46:17):
I mean.

Speaker 4 (01:46:17):
And also with Josephine Baker, which I didn't know. I
was like, she also had an affair with Georgia O'Keefe,
but I guess that they were like, we've hit the
upper limit of affairs we can show in this movie.
But I was like, if they gave Trotsky a steamy
kiss and we don't see a queer love scene, I'm
gonna I'm gonna like explore not that, but like, just
it was very weird seeing Trotsky in a horny count Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:46:41):
I hated so hard, so weird.

Speaker 2 (01:46:45):
Jeffrey Rush get away from her.

Speaker 4 (01:46:47):
I don't want to see that ever, Horny Trotsky, No,
thank you whatever, good for them.

Speaker 2 (01:46:54):
I'm happy for them, but I don't want to I
don't want to look at.

Speaker 3 (01:46:57):
It nor anyway of the day. I mean, this is
a movie about a queer, disabled communist Latina artist, and
the movie is like, yes, that's all here. We're used
to crumbs and this movie gives you more than crumbs.

Speaker 4 (01:47:13):
Yeah, and the movie is not criticizing her for because
I feel like often when we see marginalized characters, it's like,
I don't know, it's just led to their downfall or
whatever exactly, or like the movie is encouraging you to
not be on their side.

Speaker 5 (01:47:29):
And what led to her downfall we know by what
the movie says is in big part a man, which
I think is very accurate.

Speaker 2 (01:47:37):
So true, that certainly seems that way.

Speaker 5 (01:47:41):
Yeah, and they also portrayed the alcoholism part, which I
think is very important. They don't say that a lot
about free them. She was an alcoholic, so it's important
to talk about it. So yeah, I think it portrays
the nuances of her life very well, but I think
it could do it more. Of course, what I am satisfied,

(01:48:02):
I think it's I watched it as a little girl,
I shouldn't have. I got scarred for life by seeing
Freda's sister betray her in that way. But now as
an adult, I think that this is a very good movie.
At least two understand how we can start to think

(01:48:22):
about biopics in a way that they actually portray the
character in an integral manner and not just pick and
choose whatever we want to make them.

Speaker 2 (01:48:32):
Yeah, I agree.

Speaker 3 (01:48:34):
So you're going three and a half, kid, Yes, I'm
going three and a half. I will distribute them between Samahayek.
I want to give at least one nipple to the
wedding toast that actually judges character. Yes, I love that

(01:48:56):
so much. If anyone ever asks me to give a
toast at their wedding, I'm just going to cite that
exact speech noted because it's basically she's just like, I
don't believe in marriage. I think it's either delusional or
a way to trap women. But if people recognize that
and they decide to get married anyway, then good for you.

(01:49:19):
That's pretty cool, and that's how I feel about marriage.
So one nipple, two the representation of free to call
having underarm hair very good. That is something you don't
see in movies, where like there will be a movie
either at a time or a place where women would
not have removed their body hair, but because it's a movie,

(01:49:42):
it's like, yeah, all these characters in Cold Mountain don't
have any body hair, and it's just like what right?

Speaker 4 (01:49:50):
Or when you see like I'm trying to think of
what there.

Speaker 2 (01:49:53):
I saw a historical movie.

Speaker 4 (01:49:55):
Recently with nudity and every woman had a wax, and
You're like, what is this?

Speaker 2 (01:50:03):
Like what are we doing here?

Speaker 4 (01:50:05):
Yeah, it feels like such a tiny thing, but it
is wild how historically recently, just like any sort of
body hair was just sober boten. There was like that
red Carpet moment with Julia Roberts, like less than twenty
years ago where she had armpit hair and it was.

Speaker 2 (01:50:20):
Like a global news story. You're like, grow up.

Speaker 3 (01:50:24):
Yeah, anyways, and then whatever I have left, I'm not
really keeping track, but I would certainly want to give
some of my nippleage to free to call oh herself, Yeah,
feminist icon.

Speaker 4 (01:50:38):
I'm gonna do three and a half as well. I
think that because you could just as easily call this
movie Free to in Diego sort of takes away a
little bit of like the focus where you want the
movie to be, and I do agree that it seems
to be at least as far as biopics go, and
like how wildly inaccurate biopics tend to.

Speaker 2 (01:50:57):
Be or gloss over entire areas.

Speaker 6 (01:51:00):
Of the subject's identity because of what is considered acceptable
to a mainstream audience at the time of production. I
think this movie does so much more than I was
expecting and does seem to be like a solid sort
of one on one to what Frida's life was sort
of in the in the major beats, but there's no Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:51:21):
I wish that there was more focus on her artwork,
her process, and what motivated her art, versus this hyper
fixation on the relationship with Diego, because that can be
important in her life and not be the thrust of
her life, which it seems like towards the end of
her life how she felt as well, also huge question
of like would she want her life story be commodified

(01:51:43):
into a movie?

Speaker 5 (01:51:44):
Maybe not but by Hollywood no, definitely not.

Speaker 3 (01:51:49):
Yes, made by a sex criminal multi millionaire no.

Speaker 4 (01:51:55):
Right, So it's also dogging, I mean, just the darkness
in this production. I hate how it's like such a
horrible example of how even making art that is, you know,
more subversive than you're used to seeing required on Selma
Hyak's part, the like cooperation with an absolute monster to

(01:52:16):
even make it possible, and subsequently erasing all of her
amazing production work and all of this stuff, and having
the release and the awards campaign for this movie to
be completely sabotaged basically. But anyways, I like the movie
quite a bit, and so I'm going to give one
nipple to free to callow one nipple to Salma Hayek.

Speaker 2 (01:52:39):
I'm going to give hm Well one nipple.

Speaker 4 (01:52:43):
To olt from Malina Well of course, and I'll give
my final half in a showing of waving the little
white flag.

Speaker 2 (01:52:52):
I'll give the last half to Diane Lake.

Speaker 3 (01:52:55):
Whoa see, I thought you were going to be like
and I'm going to give a pile of shaite to
die and like.

Speaker 2 (01:53:00):
I'm growing up. We'll let bygone speak up by gones.

Speaker 5 (01:53:03):
Yeah, two hours ago you were a different person.

Speaker 2 (01:53:07):
Yeah, but she was so wrong to give me a sea.

Speaker 4 (01:53:11):
Come on, maybe your class was less boring.

Speaker 2 (01:53:13):
I want to showed up on time.

Speaker 4 (01:53:15):
Who maybe if all you did, if she did Okay,
now I'm being meeting again. All she ever did was
talk about how she was a credited writer on Freda.

Speaker 5 (01:53:22):
Oh my god.

Speaker 4 (01:53:23):
I was like, yeah, they came out fifteen years ago, lady,
what's new anyways?

Speaker 2 (01:53:28):
All right?

Speaker 3 (01:53:28):
Sorry, anyway, Anela, how about you? What say you?

Speaker 5 (01:53:33):
I agree with you. I think three and a half
is a good rating. My first nipple goes to Saramahayak
two because she did this amazing production and I think
I'm very proud that she's my my Paisana.

Speaker 3 (01:53:49):
Yes.

Speaker 5 (01:53:50):
Then my second one would go to the scene the
sequence that has Treats giving assassinated Anthea painting the two
that's at the same time. I found such a good
sequence that was my favorite part of the movie. And
the third one I would like to give to Frida

(01:54:10):
as an artist, but also particularly her showing up to
the exhibition for the last in her bed.

Speaker 2 (01:54:20):
Yeah, it's such a good moment. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:54:23):
Yeah. And some doctors think that that probably was the
thing that ended up killing her going out like that,
but I mean it was worth it, I think for her,
and I think it was such a good moment both
in the movie and in her life.

Speaker 2 (01:54:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:54:37):
I like the part where she's like, burn this judas
of a body because it betrays me. She was in
so much pain. Yeah, she was absolutely suffering.

Speaker 5 (01:54:47):
And there are some historians that believe that she committed
suicide by taking eleven instead of the seven pills she
had prescribed to her, because her nurse said that. But
we don't know. She died on her own terms, and
she didd everything on her own terms, and I think
that's amazing. My half of a star would go to

(01:55:08):
Rodrigo Prieto because yes, yes, he's also my Paisano. And
the cinematography is amazing, and he gave us a lot
of different movies to talk about in the span of
two minutes, so it was great.

Speaker 4 (01:55:19):
Yes we should, Kaitlin now would be a good idea
for the Matreon. Just choose two random movies. He was
a cinematographer for you could pick almost any genre of movie.

Speaker 3 (01:55:29):
Let's do it. Let's do that for December, yeah, in November.
Thank you so much Angle for joining us and for
lending your expertise. Is there anything you'd like to plug
or anything like that.

Speaker 5 (01:55:44):
I would like people to look at Tina Modotti's pictures,
her photographs. I would like to plug her even though
she's been dead for a few years now, because she's
portraying the movie and her pictures are portrayed for a
quick sequence. But I think that it's amazing how she
depicted everything communism and the Mexican Revolution and the Mexican

(01:56:05):
working class through her pictures. So look at in them
out these pictures. My Instagram account is Angela CMPs. It's
private for now, but I'll make it public for a
couple of days if anyone wants to follow act now
because if not, my students will find it and I
don't want them following me because teenagers in social media

(01:56:28):
are not my favorite thing. So that's about it. Thank
you so much for having me. I could talk to
two amazing women for two hours about my favorite topic.
So I don't know why I cannot do this every
day of my life, but I wish I could.

Speaker 2 (01:56:49):
We'll have you back for another movie. Yeah, come back anytime.

Speaker 5 (01:56:53):
Whenever you want to have me. I'll come back because
I had so much fun. Thank you very much.

Speaker 3 (01:56:57):
Oh my gosh, thank you. I had a class truly.

Speaker 2 (01:57:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:57:01):
And as far as where you can find us, it's
on the same old places Instagram. It's on the Patreon
aka Matreon five bucks a month, two bonus episodes every month,
plus the back catalog.

Speaker 4 (01:57:17):
Right now, because it's ok tuba. We are doing two
scary movies that center women, we did and we just
an episode on the Exorcist and we're covering Pearl later
in the month. So yeah, head over there, check that out.
You can get our merch at teapublic dot com. Slash
the Bechdel Cast And.

Speaker 3 (01:57:38):
With that, I'm gonna get in bed and then make
a bunch of men carry me around in bed.

Speaker 5 (01:57:45):
As you should.

Speaker 4 (01:57:46):
Yes go, everyone deserves that moment.

Speaker 5 (01:57:50):
Yep, bye bye.

Speaker 3 (01:57:57):
The Bechdel Cast is a production of iHeartMedia, host by
Caitlin Derante and Jamie Loftis, produced by Sophie Lichterman, edited
by Moe laboord our theme song was composed by Mike
Kaplan with vocals by Katherine Voskressensky. Our logo and merch
is designed by Jamie Loftis and a special thanks to
Aristotle Acevedo. For more information about the podcast, please visit

(01:58:19):
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