Cast: Eddie Redmayne, Alicia Vikander, Amber Heard
Director: Tom Hooper
The Danish Girl is the story of Lili Elbe who underwent the first male-to-female sex reassignment surgery in 1930. Eddie Redmayne plays Einar Wagener, a transvestite who has been living a normal life of a shy artist who loves his wife, Gerda Wagener, played by Alicia Vikander. They are both painters and have the usual conflicts in terms of their choice of subjects and treatment, but they compliment each other. While Alicia paints portraits, Einar does landscapes.
It is almost the coming together of two talented people adding and subtracting just enough from each other to make a perfect whole until one day a sensation is felt and an identity that had been long sleeping is awakened.
Einar’s transformation is playful, experimental and witty. Once he starts posing for Gerda, he has access to her wardrobe and the entire feminine inventory, and gradually he begins transforming, imagining and accepting the woman inside him. They make a public appearance at a hall with Einar dressed as a woman. It’s there that he is introduced as Lili Elbe for the first time.
He is convincing and gathers quite an attention, gets pursued by a dandy young gentleman, who kisses Lili and Einar realizes that Lili liked it. There are brief moments when Einar and Lili co-exist, but for the larger share it is Lili.
Lili is unaware of her complete identity when she makes contact with the gentleman again, only to realise that there is a split, physically and psychologically. She now wants complete existence, a real presence and not be restricted to posing or making public appearances.
She now wants to sleep like a woman and procreate. The transformation is very gradual but visible in every way. The only thing that is more visible is Gerda’s pain, patience, affection and love.
While today the world has accepted in large parts people who with different sexual orientations, both physically and psychologically, a century ago we were sharply more conservative, and believed strongly in the binary gender system. The world was just beginning to understand/accept these ideas, and only a handful of doctors were actually practising methods that could help patients in need.
While the film’s central character Lili/Einar was reportedly the first person to undergo a gender change procedure medically, it was not a success. Lili could not survive the procedure and did not live with her new physical identity. Things have changed since.
The Danish Girl is more than a document of Lili Elbe’s life and times. It is a beautifully crafted story and director Tom Hooper really understands the devil called “detail”. Everything in the movie is well-placed, well-decorated and properly illustrated. Alicia and Eddie are two of the finest young actors, and there is not a single moment when you doubt that they aren’t living the lives they are portraying on screen. They are so real.
The visuals are impressive and the details of the period well-established. The music is reasonable, not noticeable and that’s the thing with good music — its ability to become unnoticeable.
Eddie’s performance could be his claim to a second consecutive Oscar, and the sheer number of nominations the movie has gathered is an indication of the quality work involved. Tom Hooper, who won the Academy Award for best director for The King’s Speech, is most likely to strike gold with The Danish Girl too.
I feel compelled to mention that Eddie is an actor of exceptional talent, and if you watch the movie without reading any reviews or having any idea of the story, you will marvel at the way he steers his character from seeming perfectly normal to becoming a woman trapped in a man’s body. There is a lot going on inside him. He communicates to the audience at several levels.
Extremely calibrated physical presence coupled with an overwhelming psychological expression, he is able to maintain the suspense that real life presents us at every moment.
Alicia on the other hand lives a character that most of us will not accept. The amount of love and acceptance that she showers on Einar/Lili is overwhelming. Alicia’s character, Gerda, is faced with her husband’s transformation into a woman, which is far stranger, even today, than homosexuality. Alicia is a portrait of tragedy, and the ironic moment in the movie is when a portrait she has made of Lili becomes her ticket to success, while the same moment becomes one of the last moments when she could see and identify Einar.
The Danish Girl presents some of the best performances of the year. The movie is concise, expressive, avoids unnecessary distractions and does not attempt to create a controversial situation.
The writer is founder, Lightcube Film Society
