by Maggie Shiels in San Francisco

Kahlo turned to art after an accident in 1925

Salma Hayek has received plaudits from film critics for her portrayal of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo in Julie Taymor's film Frida.

As a love story Frida excels. But as a biopic about the tortured Mexican artist and what really drove her work, it disappoints.

And this missed opportunity is savage, because the long-awaited life and times of Frida Kahlo has been a subject that has been in Hollywood's sights for years.

Most notably, A-list celebrites such as Madonna and Jennifer Lopez tried to get projects off the ground without success.

But it was Mexican actress Salma Hayek, whose star perhaps does not shine as brightly as Madonna and Lopez, who achieved where they failed.

While Frida does not live up to the years of mounting expectation, that is not to say it is a bad film.

In fact, it is a very entertaining, colourful and boisterous movie that solicits a great performance from Alfred Molina. He really seems to inhabit the role of the great muralist Diego Rivera.

The film focuses too much on Kahlo's marriage

The main flaw is that there is too much emphasis on Kahlo's tempestuous marriage to Rivera and not enough about the woman hailed as a feminist icon and a model of sexual freedom and unconventional lifestyles.

The film starts with a bed-ridden Kahlo, who is close to death, being carried to the first exhibition of her work in Mexico in 1954.

As she travels the story jumps back to 1922, when we see Kahlo as a vibrant tomboy schoolgirl getting into scrapes with a gang of boys.

She sneaks into a school auditorium to watch Rivera who will later take her to the heights of ecstasy and pits of despair with his womanising ways.

The film swiftly gets to the heart of the trauma that is to plague Frida's life and shape her art. A tram crash in 1925 leaves her impaled on a metal rod.

The streetcar accident, shown in slow motion, is a mastery of film making by director Julie Taymor that allows you to experience the horror of the crash.

Afterwards there is a surreal sequence that takes us inside an animated hospital where puppet skeletons try to put a damaged Frida back together again.

It is a miracle she survives and while lying supine on her bed Frida takes up painting.

Hayek is too stunning for the part

Her parents fix up a special easel for her as she lies head to toe encased in a plaster cast. A mirror on the ceiling allows her to look up and see herself and so begins a life dissecting the inner and outer Kahlo.

Intellectually you can imagine how this accident stopped Kahlo in her tracks and comes to plague her life as she suffers physically and is unable to have children.

Passion

You can understand the pain and despair she endures as a result of the accident, but Hayek never really allows you to feel it.

For authenticity, the actress learned how to paint like Kahlo and dresses in her trademark brightly coloured Mexican clothing.

She also dons Frida's unibrow, or connecting eyebrows, but as she ages and endures constant physical and mental pain, Hayek's face never shows the ravages of such turmoil. In fact she is almost too beautiful for much of the time.

A roster of Hollywood notables including Ashley Judd, Antonio Banderas, Hayek's real life boyfriend Edward Norton and Geoffrey Rush, who plays Trotsky, is never more than one-dimensional.

Sexually speaking one of the film's most charged scenes is that of Kahlo's tango with Judd's character, the photographer Tina Modotti.

Another strong point of the movie is how Kahlo's anguished paintings are brought to life in a surrealist way by Taymor, known for her production of The Lion King and the 1999 film Titus.

While this Frida might not provide the hoped for insight into the enigmatic artist's psyche, it will whet your appetite enough to perhaps get hold of Hayden Herrera's book on which the film is based.