THE life and art of the Mexican artistic, sexual and political revolutionary Frida Kahlo could have made a romantic, inspirational musical.

It might have been, so rumour had it, a film vehicle for those Latino leading ladies Madonna and Jennifer Lopez.

Salma Hayek has long nurtured a wish to bring Frida's tumultuous story and uncompromising art to the screen, and that sense of commitment is palpable in her lead performance and producer's credit.

Yet commitment can be blinding, and so Julie Taymor's biopic is a lavish, sensual but conventional portrait of an iconic yet iconoclastic artistic talent: a neatly packaged, decorative hagiography rather than an elaborate, complex study of a bold, rebellious creative temperament.

It was some life, mind you. Opening with Hayek's Frida on her deathbed, defiant and spirited to the last, the next two hours chart her miraculous recovery from a tram crash that nearly crippled her in 1925; her complex yet durable relationship with her husband, womaniser, political radical and mural painter, Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina); her affair with Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky (Geoffrey Rush), en route to his ice-pick murder; and her devil-may-care romantic dalliances with women.

As an introduction to Frida, her sexual cavorting and her vividly truthful, idiosyncratic work, this is all fine and dandy, outwardly informative and artily shot too, with a jaunty, even rushed pace.

Disappointingly, amid the exotica and erotica of Mexico, we learn less of her artistic motivation: the art suffers here when there should be more of a sense of her suffering for her art, which was often painful in its expression and subject matter. We see the canvas surface but not the full picture.

That is mirrored in Hayek's luminous, sensuous but superficial performance. She has never been the deepest of actresses, hitting you in the heart and stirring you below stairs, and her Frida is a drama queen, as broadly drawn as a musical or opera character; the paint and not the pain.

Updated: 08:40 Friday, March 21, 2003