Movie Review - The Danish Girl

Tweet

2015 – Spoiler alerts The second of six movies screened at Preston’s One In Four film festival of features addressing serious mental health issues intelligently. The Danish Girl is a heavily fictionalized account of a true series of events, about the husband and wife artists, Einar Wegener (Eddie Redmayne) and Gerda Wegener (Alicia Wikander). Both were celebrated artists, in early 19th century Denmark. When a model became indisposed, Gerda got her husband to dress in the model’s stockings to allow her complete the portrait using him instead, but the use of the women’s clothes triggered memories of previous experiments with transvestism, and helped drive Einar to further obsessive use of women’s clothing. It took his wife (in the context of the film) some time to realize that her husband was not just role-playing, but actually a woman trapped in a man’s body. After facing a great deal of prejudice, and homophobia and doctors eager to section him as insane, Einar finally discovered a Parisian doctor who was a pioneer of early, then extremely risky transgender surgery. Einar plunged into the operations, taking them and his medications too quickly, and died soon after his transformation was completed. His wife and a former childhood friend stood by him throughout his transformation. A beautifully filmed story, with great performances though the film was highly criticised for its many inaccuracies, mostly due to its faithfulness to the heavily fictionalized bestselling novel it was based on, rather than the full true story. Gerda was more aware in reality of her husband’s needs and she herself was a practicing lesbian. Einar’s transition into Lili took four operations, not two, and he survived the last surgery by a year before infections killed him. He died in 1931. In the film, his wife stands by him right to his death, but after his transition led to the legal annulment of their marriage she left him. He died hoping he might be given a uterus to enable him to have children, which is still impossible today. Though not the first transgender surgery recipient, Lili kept a detailed autobiography of his life which has been of great importance in understanding the feelings, motives and needs and experiences of transsexuals ever since. The movie was followed by a question and answer session with three fascinating transsexuals who were open, perceptive and very amusing in their stories and how they feel about the movie. One of them had declined to watch as she felt strongly that Lili should have been played by an actress rather than a straight male actor. Too many transgender movies do seem to involve simply pressing an actor into a dress. It is undoubtedly time this changed. Arthur Chappell