Canadian tv tonight was showing "Frida" and I watched it. Most of it. Almost all of it. I tend not to have patience somehow for movies on tv, and I get up every so often and check email, or set up the coffee maker for the morning, things that could wait. Twitch, twitch. But I knew I'd chicken out watching some of this film. Right now, this minute, I'm not sure it was a good idea to watch it. I'm sure that will change in a few hours.

I knew about Frida Kahlo long before she was hip and trendy and a cool icon. Back in the 70s, I saw a documentary film on her. There are no words for how it made me feel. But over the years, as I heard rumors about an interest in a film about Frida, I cringed. Aw, jesus, what they would do to her. Madonna wanted to be Frida, Jennifer friggin Lopez wanted to be Frida - after all, they'd both done fictional portrayals of real people - Evita Peron and Selena, right? Christ. Not only that but it was too late to film this movie. In my heart, the only person to play Diego Rivera died in 1994 (shit, already?) and that was the brilliant Raul Julia. This is no slam against the acting talent of Alfred Molina, folks, it's just, well, dammit, he just was, for me, the casting that should have been. And I just looked Raul Julia up and his birthday, was March 9. As is mine. Okay, stop stalling.

Then the rumors got better, but I still cringed because I kept reading about how the film would stress "the love story'" between Frida and Diego. And it made my skin itch to think of her portrayed as the little woman, as the long-suffering wife of the unfaithful bold passionate political man and blah blah blah. And I had read Hayden Herrera's book. I remember not liking it; as I recall, because she kept doing something I HATE in biographies; putting words, thoughts in the subject's brain, as if she knew what Frida was thinking. She knew, she intuited, whatEVER, because she was so informed on her subject that she could speak for Frida. Anyway, that's what I remember of that book. Fuck. I don't know, I could be wrong but I'm going to bet you that I knew more often what Frida was thinking than most folks.

And along comes the fearless Salma Hayek. And she gets it. And while yeah, it mostly is about Frida and Diego sitting in a tree, k-I-s-s-I-n-g, she got SO much of Frida Kahlo. And there were some marvelous acting jobs - Geoffrey Rush was unrecognizable to me as Trotsky as was Roger Rees as Guillermo Kahlo.

I skipped the bus accident by the way I knew it was coming; dinner was just about ready at the time, so I whoooshed into the kitchen quickly so I wouldn't watch. I couldn't. There are tons of details in the film, from the paintings which I know, to details of her life which worked. I'm having trouble saying too much more because I'm sort of freaked out. It was, I'm realizing, a little too hard to watch. I love it for the brilliance of the filming and the reproduction of her paintings, the verisimilitude of their lives. But I think I'm going to have a case of the shudders a little tonight. It's not that I'm Frida Kahlo, don't think for a minute that I think that. Nor that I'll end up like her. But that movie fuckin freaked me out. There's just flat out too much that I GET and that GOT to me a little too closely. I think it's time out for some fluffy bunnies (no, Cornelia, not THOSE bunnies.)