The Danish Girl (2015)
Certified: 15 minutes
Duration: 119 minutes
Directed by: Tom Hooper
Starring: Eddie Redmayne, Alicia Vikander, Matthias Schoenaerts, Ben Whishaw, Amber Heard, Sebastian Koch, Emerald Fennell, Adrian Schiller
KRS Releasing Ltd
The Danish Girl is set in 1920s Copenhagen when married couple and painters Einar and Gerda Wegener (Eddie Redmayne, Alicia Vikander) seem to be happy together. He is known for his landscape paintings while her portraits are not selling or attracting any attention. This does create a certain amount of friction at times.
At one point Einar ends up putting on woman’s attire for Gerda to paint him. This has an impact on him because he starts to feel comfortable in woman’s clothes.
When Gerda proposes that they go to a reception, she tells him to dress up as a woman for fun and pretend to be a cousin. Little did she anticipate how much this will escalate and to what extent it will affect Einar’s sexual identity. At the event Einar ends up connecting with another youth, Henrik (Ben Whishaw), and when Gerda finds them embracing, she is confused and hurt.
Einar starts to spend more time in his female persona as Lili and Gerda paints more portraits of him. Suddenly these portraits become all the rage and Axgil (Mathias Schoenaerts), Einar’s friend and an art dealer, starts to focus on Gerda’s new art.
Meanwhile, Einar is not happy with just being Lili. That is when they meet Dr Warnekros (Sebastian Koch), a surgeon who has his theories on gender reassignment surgery. These surgeries are still in their infancy and are associated with some health risks.
The Danish Girl is based on the novel by David Ebershoff, which is fictional but loosely based on the real life story of Danish painters Lili Elbe and Gerda Wegener.
The Danish Girl is prime Oscar material with both Redmayneand Vikander delivering strong performances. It’s the acting coupled with its social message and its art-deco style that give the film its look and sense of identity. It’s also picture perfect and director Tom Hooper knows it, and manipulates and capitalises on it.
In fact, Redmayne’s performance is probably one of the main reasons why one should watch The Danish Girl as he delivers another complex performance after his Academy Award-winning role as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything earlier this year.
Redmayne and Vikander’s onscreen energy and commitment is very evident. They seem to be ready to bare their soul and let the camera intrude subtly into their characters’ inner feelings. Vikander in particular shows a stamina that is much beyond her years.
The film’s intention is not to recreate historical veracity; in fact, it is told through a very modern outlook and viewpoint. But it manages to create drama.
The Danish Girl is a very fragile film, both in its approach and style, and yet it is this sense of fragility that allows one to appreciate the protagonists and their development on screen.