The Danish Girl

Rating: 8/10 (14 January 2016)

From director Tom Hooper (The King's Speech, Les Misérables), I saw the review for this on Film 2015 with Claudia Winkleman and Danny Leigh, and having watched it I was not surprised when awards season came around that this got the attention it did. Based on the true story, in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1926, Danish portrait artist Gerda Wegener (Oscar winning, and BAFTA and Golden Globe nominated Alicia Vikander) is trying to find and paint a work of art to satisfy her patron. She asks her husband, popular landscape artist Einar (Oscar, BAFTA and Golden Globe nominated Eddie Redmayne), to stand in for a female model who was late for posing for her new painting at their flat. Einar is made to wear female clothing on an occasion, then he and Gerda are invited to an event, but he has no desire to be gushed over, so they work together to dress and disguise himself as a woman, as Lili Elbe, and as his alter ego he is highly convincing. Gerda also finds her inspiration, using Einar as her subject, using his natural features, and turning them feminine, and of course he is dressed up again as a woman, these new paintings impress her patrons and she is finally recognised in a gallery unlike her works before. However this posing as a female figure changes the lifelong identification of Einar, what starts as a first tentative and then irreversible progression, Einar leaves behind his former identity and becomes Lili Elbe. This takes place as both Lili and Gerda relocate to Paris, France, there Gerda meets Einar's childhood friend now art dealer Hans Axgil (Matthias Schoenaerts), also the first boy Einar had ever kissed. Gerda and Hans become mutually attracted, but this causes problems as her relationship with Einar is changing, he is now Lili entirely in persona and identity, and having a relationship of sorts with Henrik (Skyfall's Ben Whishaw), Hans plays a supportive role for the couple. Ultimately Gerda accepts that Einar has fully changed into Lili, and in a conversation with doctor Kurt Warnekros (Sebastian Koch) they find out that he can perform a surgery to change Lili into a full woman, the first instances of male to female sex reassignment surgery. This operation is in two parts, the first to remove Lili's external genitalia, and after recovery the second to fashion a vagina, but Lili's eagerness to go ahead leads her to rush the sequence of procedures, and she eventually dies of complications from the surgery. The end of the film sees Gerda accepting the death of Lili, and her former husband Einar, she and Hans return to Denmark and go to a cliff edge, Gerda wears a scarf that Lili had given her after the second operation, it is taken away by the wind. Also starring Drive Angry's Amber Heard as Ulla, Emerald Fennell as Elsa, Henry Pettigrew as Niels, Richard Dixon as Fonnesbech, Pip Torrens as Dr. Hexler, Adrian Schiller as Rasmussen and Boy Meets Girl's Rebecca Root as Nurse. Redmayne gives a fantastically sensitive and delicate performance as the man who experiments with cross- dressing then of course dedicates himself to becoming his new female persona, and Vikander is sensational as the wife forced to let go of what was once her husband and support him in his transformation. You could argue that the film is almost entirely from the point of view of the wife of the man turning into a woman, but the ultimate point of this film is to explore the complexities that come with gender reassignment, this was one of the first in history, it is a little fabricated in what you can and can't see, but there is no doubt of its emotional power, a great biographical drama. It was nominated the Oscars for Costume Design Paco Delgado and Best Production Design, it was nominated the BAFTA for the Alexander Korda Award for Best British Film, Best Costume Design and Best Makeup and Hair, and it was nominated the Golden Globe for Best Original Score for Alexandre Desplat. Very good!