The Danish Girl

The character of Gerda Wegner really moved me a lot because of the love she had for her life partner. Based on the life story of Danish painter Einar Wegener, The Danish Girl has that material in it to make you think about the definition of true love that lies beyond mere possessiveness. With Eddie Redmayne giving a riveting on screen performance as Lili, this Tom Hooper film remains in your thoughts because of certain aching factors.

Einar Wegener is a Danish painter whose wife Gerda is also a painter. At a point in their married life, Gerda requests him to dress up as a female so that she could complete a portrait. That apparently kick starts a lot of new issues in their life such as Einar’s desire to be a female and lack of interest in painting. The Danish Girl is about the journey of these two to tackle these unexpected issues that shook their world.

It is a real life story about the first ever sex reassignment surgery. The difficult part of course is not making it a documentary with emotionless characters. The movie wonderfully constructs a warm relationship between the lead pair very smoothly and swiftly in the first fifteen or twenty minutes itself. The film thus gradually advances towards the conflict and approaches the dilemma of characters very maturely. The writer Lucinda Coxon succeeds in presenting the female protagonist as a faithful and caring personality and you will really admire what Gerda was willing to do for her partner at that time when the easy solution for any such activity was saying that the patient is “insane”.

Last year at the Oscars, Eddie Redmayne won the best actor award and I have to say that this year he will give a tough competition for DiCaprio. Redmayne was fabulous in portraying the coolness, the understanding, the inhibitions, the pain and the joy of Lili. The controlled performance that concentrated more on the delicate emotional changes was great to watch. Alicia Vikander also performs really well as the impossibly sensible Gerda.

Tom Hooper manages to bring life in to the offbeat kind of treatment by giving real shape to his characters. The love and equation of the lead pair brims with understanding and that really helps the movie a lot in being a heart wrenching tale. The screenplay has narrated the whole incident in a way that gives the whole story of a positive outlook. I never found it melodramatically dull. The faith and trust shown by the wife was visualized very neatly. The cinematography was good. The art and background score also scored.

The Danish Girl has the warmth of a relationship. It isn’t just a tale of a man’s desire to be a woman, but it is also the story of a strong woman who was willing to make a huge sacrifice for the love of her life. Spectacular acting and an impressive making puts the movie in the elite class.