"There was a moment when I was just Lili..."

Rating: 8/10 (3 May 2017)

For a film dealing with subject matter completely out of my comfort zone, I thought director Hooper sensitively handled a complex topic intelligently in the manner of Ang Lee's "Brokeback Moountain" of 2005. The movie itself is beautifully filmed, and Eddie Redmayne's performance as the transgendered Einar/Lili comes close to his Oscar winning portrayal of Stephen Hawking in the prior year's "The Theory Of Everything". Alicia Vikander is also competent in the role of Einar's wife Gerda, resolutely standing by her spouse's decision to follow through on a sex change operation after initial misgivings about Einar's apparently sudden mental and physical transformation. Taking place in the late 1920's in Europe, I wasn't surprised at the reaction of the medical profession to what was going on with Einar, though I wouldn't have thought that experimental forms of gender reassignment surgery took place as early as 1930. To think that if Einar had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, he might have wound up in an institution for moral depravity undergoing treatment for perversion. In that regard, the film chronicles a valiant pioneering effort on the part of Einar/Lili for those individuals hopelessly conflicted over their own sexual identity.