A new biopic of Frida Kahlo is a homage to the artist by director Julie Taymor, writes Helen Meany

Films about visual artists have been the downfall of many directors. It seems difficult to avoid that moment on screen when the soundtrack becomes laden with significance, there's a flurry of furrowed brows and brush strokes and the great creative work is born. In the case of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907-54), the interlacing of the life and the work seems a more attainable directorial goal: her life was her subject.

From her first self-portraits, painted when she was bedridden for months after a tram crash at the age of 18, her work portrayed her face and body in a style that is both naive and playfully surrealist, allowing her to explore her emotional and psychological states. This was one of the attractions of her life story for the American theatre, opera and film director Julie Taymor, whose new biopic, Frida, is screened at Dublin International Film Festival today and opens next week.

"The challenge of films about artists is how to get at that creative drive," Taymor says. "With Frida Kahlo, her paintings are her life - she was self-obsessed. She took the events of her life and made them into art. So it's all completely organic. The paintings and the life are integrated."

The film is an act of homage to the artist by Taymor and its star, Salma Hayek, who was the driving force behind the film, co-produced it and whose closeness to the project probably contributes to its overly reverential, almost hagiographical approach. Shot on location by the Mexican cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, its warm lighting and palette of vibrant primary colours reflect the life-affirming tone of the screenplay, which is credited to four screenwriters and based on Hayden Herrera's biography of the artist. The score, by Taymor's partner, film composer Elliot Goldenthal, incorporates Mexican songs and melodies.

Kahlo's gruesome accident, in which her spine was fractured, her pelvis crushed and her right leg and foot broken, caused her to endure bouts of ferocious pain throughout her life, and she was bedridden intermittently.

Her death at the age of 47 might have been suicide. It was not long after the amputation of one of her legs, following an attack of gangrene. She also suffered the misery and humiliation of marriage to a serial philanderer. Diego Rivera, the charismatic muralist, was already established as Mexico's most famous artist and a leading member of its communist party by the time the beautiful 22-year-old Kahlo married him. Frida tells their story, a carnival of drinking, dancing and dreaming of the revolution, followed by tempestuous partings and reunions - one of which is marked by a memorable exchange:

Kahlo: "You've lost weight."

Rivera: "You've lost your toes."

Taymor and Hayek's team were anxious to shake off the image of Kahlo as an icon of female suffering that had clung to her since the 1980s, when her work became the focus of feminist criticism and her arresting self-portraits in traditional Mexican costume were widely reproduced.

"We wanted to show that there was pain, yes, but that she had a lust for life - her final painting was called Viva La Vida," Taymor says. "She was single-minded too, a self-created woman. She used art to release the pain, and she was strong. I wanted to try to show how a person can transcend the sorrow and the pain." Taymor is sceptical of the notion, which she observes in northern Europe and North America especially, that unhappiness denotes gravity or profundity.

"People have a tendency to think that sorrow is deeper than joy, but I don't agree. And this is a very Mexican story - I wanted to show all the colour and celebration that is part of that culture. Joy is so deep in Mexico. People are closer to the power of nature and to music. Even the Catholicism has a wildness about it. There's a richness and sense of irony there that makes North Americans seem too simplistic."

The most successful sections of the film, which lift it from the frequent banality of the screenplay, are Taymor's bold visual creations. Kahlo's crash, described by Taymor as "the birth of her as an artist", is a beautiful cascade of glass, exotic birds and gold dust, with Kahlo's shattered limbs shimmering, shot from above. Her convalescence is depicted in a fantasy sequence in which Day of the Dead skeletons grin and sway around her bed. Taymor has fun with animation again later, depicting Rivera and Kahlo's whirlwind visit to New York in a series of postcards, with Rivera hovering over them all as King Kong and the Empire State building floating in Frida's bath.

Many of the screen compositions are tableaux vivants, based on paintings by Kahlo, which initially appear to be two- dimensional, then slowly come to life. After Kahlo has discovered Rivera sleeping with her sister, she cuts off her hair in grief. In a dramatic juxtaposition, this image is repeated in slow motion, moving in and out of time. It is superimposed on a sequence showing her attempting to drink and party away her sorrows, before it metamorphoses into the frozen image of Kahlo's self-portrait with cropped hair. It's a very theatrical moment, using forced perspective sets, but with effects that aren't available in the theatre.

"I'm interested in doing cinematic things in theatre and theatrical things in cinema," Taymor says. "Look at the German expressionists: they used the cinema theatrically. Movies have become so literal now, but I'm interested in showing a skewed mirror of a life, taking an almost Cubist approach. And I want the photography to have power in its expression. Movies have lost respect for the power of photography. It should be used consciously, so that the technique supports the emotion."

Taymor's appreciation of the transformational potential of art dates from a formative period in Bali in her early 20s, when she formed a theatre troupe that worked with masks and puppetry and used traditional forms based on ritual. This, on top of a theoretical grounding in mythology, folklore and shamanism at university in the US, propelled her in the direction of an experimental style of visual theatre that could be appreciated at the level of spectacle alone but also had more ambitious aims.

The most obvious example of this is her acclaimed stage version of The Lion King, which has been running on Broadway since 1997. It satisfies the ambitions of the Disney corporation while giving full rein to her characteristic blend of live actors, puppets and masks.

"Indonesia gave me an understanding of the origins of theatre and the power of performance. I also realised that you can create work on many levels. I want to create theatre, opera or cinema that speaks to a wide audience but doesn't pander to them, that allows them to hook in at whatever level they can.

"I don't aim for direct expression; I'm working through transformation. So I don't like to see talking heads or realistic, kitchen-sink drama on stage. You want audiences to see things differently through the experience in front of them. There is revelation in art. Our function is to provide awe."

Frida is being screened as part of Dublin International Film Festival at 6.20 p.m. today. It opens in cinemas on Friday