"The Velocity of Salma" by Anne Stockwell (December 10, 2002)
From the interview:
83 year-old singer Chavela Vargas, who was a lover of Kahlo's in real life. Vargas plays Death, singing in a man's suit in a barroom with a bottle of mescal. Gloriously androgynous, her voice pure gravel, Vargas jolts the film from reenactment into the dimension where Kahlo truly lived.That's a great scene, and that's such a cool convergence.
From the interview:
On-screen you always wore Frida’s unibrow, but not really her mustache. Did you feel the mustache was going too far?Notice how she didn't really answer the question? Blergh.
She didn’t have that big of a mustache when she was younger. You can’t see it, and in the paintings she exaggerated it. Toward the end, when she got older [leans over conspiratorially], her mustache grew. And she kept exaggerating in the paintings, but the mustache grew.
She exaggerated the mustache?
I think the eyebrow and the mustache—this is a personal interpretation—are symbolic to Frida of her freedom. The eyebrow, in a couple of paintings, she made a bird out of it, a symbol of freedom. She didn’t try to pluck them to be like everyone else. It is the freedom of one’s acceptance for who one is. And I think the mustache was her acceptance for her male part. And how she celebrates it! She celebrates that part of herself.