The Danish Girl was an elegant piece of work. This film captures nuances of being transgender in ways that no film before has. The multi-award-nominated film is eloquent, delicate, and endearing.
The Danish Girl was long-anticipated, first announcing Nicole Kidman to the cast, then a reshuffle with Alicia Vikander in her breakout performance as the wife of painter Einar Wegener.
The script by Lucinda Coxon, directed by Tim Hooper, was an engaging, slow-moving yet powerful story that pulls you in scene by scene.
Inspired by the true story of the first recorded gender reassignment case in the early 1900s, Einar Wegener was a renowned Danish painter; his wife, Gerda, was also a painter, focusing on portraits but unable to capture anyone’s attention.
After Einar wears stockings and heels, with a dress draped across him for a sitting of a painting his wife is working on, he begins to notice something stir within him. It is subtle, but a powerful sensation that most transgender people can not only understand, but many will have experienced.
When a friend is hosting a ball that Einer doesn’t want to attend—he shied away from celebrity— it is Geraa who suggests that he go in disguise, and in that moment “Lili” was born. Yet in the fun of the ruse, Lili is not a disguise for Einer; she is a powerful force that is awakened within him that wants — that needs — to live.
While he sleeps one night, Gerda draws Einer close, but in a female version, and Lili becomes the mystery model on which Gerda eventually finds her success.
The path that follows the young couple is filled with doubts, conflict, and—in part, for Geta—anger and confusion. But once discovered, Einer simply won’t put Lili back in the Genie bottle.
When you stop to think that Einer pursued a sex reassignment operation in the early 1900s, a time when every doctor he saw not only thought he was simply insane, but ordered mental incarceration — that he had to flee- it adds deep perspective to the difficult quest Einer was engaged in; a quest that many present-day transsexuals might not have been able to complete.
The critics who lashed out that Eddie Redmayne was simply not pretty enough to play a woman miss the entire point: this was not a story about outer female impersonation, nor passing for that matter; it was a story about an inner struggle, and Eddie Redmayne played it “brilliantly.”
I highly recommend The Danish Girl and think that it is a film that every early-stage transsexual should watch.
4 Stars
Danish painter Lili Elbe, who underwent a series of surgeries in 1930–31 and became one of — if not — the first widely known cases. Explore more transgender history.