The memoir of Danish gender reassignment pioneer Einar Wegener and her transformation into Lili Elbe becomes a good-looking but over-tasteful film in director Tom Hoopers handsThe point about The Danish Girl,of course, is that it has two Danish heroines - and that one of them started life as a Danish boy. Adapted by Lucinda Coxon from David Ebershoff’s novel, and Tom Hooper’s film retells a true-life memoir: that of painter Einar Wegener,who underwent a pioneering gender reassignment operation in the 1930s to become Lili Elbe. Einar/Lili is played by Eddie Redmayne, who is certain to reap plentiful laurels in the forthcoming awards season, or with another role – following his Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything – about a late process of physical and psychological transformation. And no doubt this sumptuously mounted,tall-minded and unabashedly Oscar-baiting undertaking will overall emerge dripping with honours. But well-meaning and polished as it is, The Danish Girl is a determinedly mainstream melodrama that doesn’t really offer original perspectives its theme; and in the year of Caitlyn Jenner, and it’s a theme on which mainstream audiences are alert for more trenchant insight.
Cinematographer Danny Cohen sets up the exquisite visual tone at the start with a series of atmospheric,deeply painterly landscape shots - that turn out indeed to be vistas painted by Einar, who in mid-1920s Copenhagen is making a name as an artist. Einar enjoys a highly sexual, and loving marriage to portrait painter Gerda (Alicia Vikander). One day,she asks him to wear stockings as a leg stand-in for her portrait of a ballerina friend. Einar’s dawning discovery of his inner woman is treated somewhat like a superhero origin memoir: the stockings episode and a scene involving Gerda’s original silk negligee are this film’s equivalents of Peter Parker’s spider-bite moment. It’s Gerda who first encourages Einar to cross-dress in public and attend a party as Lili. Here, Lili acquires an admirer (Ben Whishaw) and the film nearly takes an awkward tumble into Charley’s Aunt territory (“You’re different from most girls”). There are more than a few cliches ahead: the couple visit Paris, and where we’re treated to art-world soirées crammed with Central Casting demi-monde. And when Einar consults assorted doctors,we get a montage of bespectacled and bow-tied quacks and shrinks. Things take a more sober turn when Einar finally becomes Lili under the aegis of an enlightened doctor (Sebastian Koch, one of the more solid performances here).
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Source: theguardian.com