by
Douglas Messerli
Lucinda
Coxon (screenplay, based on the novel by David Ebershoff), Tom Hooper
(director) The Danish Girl / 2015
Reviewer
Christy Lemire begins her Roger Ebert-site review of Tom Hooper’s The Danish
Girl with the very questions I had about this work:
“Can
a movie be impeccably made—well-cast and strongly acted, flawlessly appointed
and gorgeously shot—yet still leave you cold? Can it do everything right
technically without touching you emotionally? Can it offer a transporting
experience without changing you one bit? Such is the conundrum with The
Danish Girl.”
The
film about one of the first Danish transgender sex changes is beautifully
filmed by cinematographer Danny Cohen, beginning with a hedge of trees that
Einar Wegener (Eddie Redmayne) paints again and again, as well as a lush score
by Hollywood favorite, composer Alexandre Desplat.
Wegener, at least in this fictionalized
version, was deeply in love with his lesser successful portrait-painter wife, Gerda
(Alicia Viklander). The film suggests that they lasted 6 years, lopping off 20
years from their real marriage, the truth of which might have made for a much
more compelling story. How many years did Lili remain, as she describes it, “inside”
the body of Einar the artist?
Even more important, the film seems to
basically ignore Gerda’s own sexual conundrums. Although Hopper (through writer David Ebershoff's novel) does hint that she helped push
the beautiful young artist into his feminine identity, first through a quick
posing for her as their ballerina friend Ulla Poulsen (inexplicably named Ulla
Paulson in this work) and later, in a somewhat kinky manner, enjoying the fact that
her husband/lover observes her new nightgown and later wears it under his suit—with
shades of Ed Wood—and, finally, encourages him to make a party appearance
as his inner Lili, at the same her personal life, given her many paintings of
lesbian women (not just her “in drag” husband) is totally ignored. Perhaps this
long-term couple was not so heterosexual as this movie pretends.
Moreover, both the original book and this
cinematic version create imaginary relationships with characters named Hans
(Matthias Schonaerts)—who first kissed Einar as a young man—and Henrik (Ben
Whishaw) who, apparently knowingly falls in love and kisses Lili at the party,
suggesting Einar might have been a homosexual simply confused about who he/she
was. Certainly, several doctors he consults suggest as much as well, and are
prepared to lock him up as a pervert or simple mental case.
Many transgender males, however, do not
have homosexual tendencies before their sexual shift (apparently Caitlyn Jenner
being one of them). If it may be confusing for general audiences, love is
simply like that. The lines of sex and love are not easily drawn.
And, even more importantly, why not
explore Gerda’s own later relationship with Fernando Porta or Lili’s connections
to Claude Lejeune? Or, for that matter, why shoot a film about a “Danish woman”
in Norway? Although both countries have had long relationships, in my
experience they are very different.
This, obviously, is truly a fiction, as
film often is. And reasons for authorial and directorial choices in how to
present characters are obviously complex and sometimes obscure. But, in this
film, Hooper’s choices are at the heart of what makes us unable to comprehend
and feel for its figures. The feminine in Redmayne’s performance, despite the
beautiful somewhat feminine features of his own beautiful body, seem all to do
here with a love of satin and silk, more an issue of cross-dressing rather than
the radical sexual operations he undergoes—the removal of his penis and
insertion of a vagina—that ultimately killed him. If you want to become a woman
to dress up, put on a wig, and makeup, then, I might suggest, you don’t know
what a woman is. Lili’s courage and sacrifices become utterly trivialized.
And why would any director want Gerda to
rush to Lili’s death bed, when the very outsiderness of her actions at that
time, meant, as reality proclaimed, she could no longer join him, and was not
there at the time of his death?
There are times when truth is more
interesting than fiction. As Lili herself says after her first operation: “I am
entirely myself.” Too bad we didn’t truly get to know that self.
Los
Angeles, February 14, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (February 2020).
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