Dispose of yourself, no matter what for

Rating: 8/10 (23 July 2018)

Complicity, the purest complicity is the league that leads people to reveal themselves to each other, to influence each other deeply, to deepen their desires in common, and to construct their particular joint scenes. Couples can achieve levels of companionship and mutual admiration that lead them to love each other intensely and truly. Love, not passion. Friendly affection, careful, dedicated, the will to support the other and be the basis for the other achievements. The Danish painters Einar and Gerda Wegener, who lived in Europe in the early twentieth century, have achieved this love. They became extremely accomplices. He wanted to reach a point never attempted by humans and that emerged as a possibility in his day, she took his desire to the point of being not only her own but an artistic attempt of both.
In "The Danish Girl" we are presented to a passionate, friend couple, who makes their shared life in a succession of moments of pleasure, experimentation, romance, joy, ardent passion, mutual professional and artistic support. Both painters, Einar already relatively successful as an artist, while Gerda seeks to achieve recognition similar to that of her husband. They met very young, when students of the "Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts" in Copenhagen, Denmark. They married in 1904, he 22 and she 19 years old. Made for each other, a man who by that time had already idealized being a woman and who was becoming madly horny in this desire and a lesbian.
With a memorable interpretation of Eddie Redmayne (Einar) and also magnificent acting by Alicia Vikander (Gerda), the film drives the spectators to feel all the pain suffered by both in the process of decision of the painter trying to get the sensation of being a woman; and go through surgeries to amputate his genitalia and artificially construct a feminine sexual organ mimesis. It was something like the couple had come together to give life to a work of art. A few years before Einar and Gerda tried to create Lili, Oscar Wilde wisely stated: "Life imitates art much more than art imitates life".
As exciting and extremely rewarding as the acting of the main actors is the photography of the film. Director of photography Danny Cohen has done something phenomenal, something really rare and that strikes us, the scenes seem to be built of pictures, paintings that succeed each other. They truly fill our eyes and challenge us to find one among them that does not resemble a beautiful picture and convey the emotions contained within. Nothing more appropriate for a narrative about part of the life of the painters. Cohen also performed in the same role in other feature films, highlighting "The King's Speech" and "Les MisÃ©rables", but it was with "The Danish Girl" that he reached the level of splendor.
Tom Hooper did an exceptional job, also directed the two famous films mentioned above, but it is with the story of Einar and Gerda that he manages to make us deeply identify with the sadness and the disturbance of the Wegener couple. Since watching "The Danish Girl," I wonder how Hooper would film the story of a person with Bodily Identity Identity Disorder.