March 19, 2024

Review: The heartbreaking and yet life-affirming story of The Danish Girl

Charlie Chan Says: Landscape painter with a delicate frame, Female by nature but sadly not name

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Superman. Is it a man? Is it a woman? No, it’s The Danish Girl, a poignant screenplay by the Oscar-winning director of The King’s Speech Tom Cooper and the BAFTA-nominated screenwriter of The Crimson Petal and the White Lucinda Coxon. Based on David Ebershoff’s fictionalised account it tells of the life of Danish landscape painter Einar Wegener who as Lili Elbe became one of the first people to undergo gender reassignment surgery in the early 1930s.NewImage
Fresh from his success as the MND-afflicted physicist Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, Eddie Redmayne once again transforms his delicate frame, this time into the even more delicate features of transgender woman Lili Elbe.

After a commonplace opening which pains itself to establish, beyond doubt, that the Wegeners are a happily married couple and successful artists in their respective fields – Nothing unusual to see here, move along! – brush by brush and glance by glance we begin to suspect that behind the carefully constructed facade of the sitter and the intricately crafted canvas of the painter lies an unexplored world of secrets and desires. “Such concentration,” remarks Gerda as she admires her husband’s close attention to detail. “Sometimes when you’re working, I think you’re going to slip through the surface of the painting and vanish.” “Don’t worry,” replies Einar. “I won’t disappear into the bog. The bog is in me.”

When one of Gerda’s clients fails to show up for a sitting, she convinces a reluctant Einar to don a pair of silk stockings and ballet shoes so that she can put the finishing touches to what she hopes will be the first in a long line of lucrative commissions. With the deadline looming, he complies with little grace but an abundance of good humour, by first putting the tights on the wrong way round and then almost cutting off the circulation to his feet as he squeezes his hairy toes into the slender shoes. “No, I need the dress,” she sighs. “I’m not putting it on,” he remonstrates. “I haven’t asked you to,” she reassures him before fetching it from the adjoining room and carefully laying it across his chest.

Dormant feelings stir within, as a confused Einar slowly runs his fingers down the seam of the dress and caresses its delicate underlay. With the genie belatedly out of the bottle, over the weeks and months ahead he graduates from holding a dress in front of his awkward body to surreptitiously donning his wife’s lace-edged slip and then doing what I imagine all fathers dread of their sons who embark on their first year of drama school: running off to the theatre, whipping off his kecks, tucking his meat and two veg between his legs and then parading about in front of a full-length mirror wearing nothing but women’s clothing. As Noel Coward satirically warned: Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington!

At first, Gerda treated her husband’s cross-dressing as nothing more than harmless fun, a game, a healthy exploration and testing of the boundaries of gender identity, which she not only accepted but keenly encouraged for her own personal and financial gain after her portraits of the pretty Lili began to sell for an even prettier penny to the well-connected art dealer Rasmussen (Adrian Schiller). But after she discovered him kissing another man at the bohemian Artists’ Ball (Ben Whishaw as the flirtatious gay bachelor Henrik), the excrement hit the air-conditioning.

What follows is a truly heartbreaking and yet life-affirming story about how two brave individuals, so deeply in love but unable to satisfy each other’s needs, begin the long, slow, painful process of uncoupling and going their separate ways. Gerda as a struggling artist grieving for the loss of her husband. Lili as a transgender heterosexual woman embarking on a series of groundbreaking surgical procedures which she hopes will allow her to shed the disappointments of her past and look towards the future with a renewed sense of hope. “The doctor cured the sickness that was my disguise,” she tells Henrik. “God made me a woman.”

Eddie Redmayne and Alicia Vikander are equally terrific in the lead roles, so much so that the film should really be called The Danish Girls because it is as much about Gerda’s personal journey as it is Lili’s. Matthias Schoenaerts, Sebastian Koch and Ben Whishaw are perfectly cast and offer tremendous support, particularly Whishaw who shines in his cameo as the flirtatious Henrik. “Do you know the story of this oak tree?” he asks in a subtle nudge-nudge, wink-wink, say-no-more kind of a way. “They say if you eat its acorns you can make a wish and become anyone you want for a day.”

And director Tom Cooper and screenwriter Lucinda Coxon have done a fine job of both lightening the often sombre mood with a series of one-liners – “You know, I’ve only really liked a handful of people in my life,” says Hans Axgil (Matthias Schoenaerts) to his childhood friend Lili. “And you’ve been two of them.” – and weaving in the complexities of the subject matter including transphobic hate crime, surgical risk and shocking examples of clinical incompetence such as misdiagnosed schizophrenia, cranial lobotomy, radiation therapy and, my favourite, “I’ve listened carefully and I’m afraid it’s not good news: you’re a homosexual.”

The three qualms I have – and they are biggies – are that the plot unfurls like a roll of fine silk: rich, subtle and impressive to look at; but without any variance of pace or colour. There are far too many extreme close-ups of trembling lower lips and tear-strewn cheeks which detract from the one or two times when they would have been appropriate such as when Lili is left alone with her thoughts on the eve of her first high-risk irreversible operation. And early on, there is a strained almost choreographed quality to Redmayne and Vikander’s displays of affection and lovemaking. But thankfully the spirit of Lili, much like the radiation therapy which one of her quack doctors wanted to prescribe, “destroys the bad and saves the good.”

Verdict: 3/5
by Peter Callaghan

Director: Tom Hooper

Writer: Lucinda Coxon

Cast: Eddie Redmayne, Alicia Vikander, Matthias Schoenaerts,
Ben Whishaw, Amber Heard, Sebastian Koch, Adrian Schiller

Release: 1 Jan 2016 Rating: 15 Running Time: 120 mins

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