The Danish Girl
(UK, 120 min.)
Dir. Tom Hooper, Writ. Lucinda Coxon
Starring: Eddie Redmayne, Alicia Vikander, Amber Heard,
Ben Whishaw, Matthias Schoenaerts
Programme: Special Presentations (North American Premiere)
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| Photo Courtesy of TIFF |
“Would you do something for me?” Gerda (Alicia Vikander)
asks her husband during an early scene in The
Danish Girl. Gerda’s husband, Einar (Eddie Redmayne), bashfully submits.
It’s a simple request, especially since both the wife and her husband are
painters: she asks him to pose for her. Gerda isn’t painting a man, though;
she’s painting a woman, and she needs a pair of stockinged legs to extend a
pretty shoe diagonally through the canvas.
What ensues is an especially fine bit of silent acting by Redmayne as Einar embraces the dress Gerda gives him (simply the stockings won’t do) and he weaves his fingers along the seams and hugs the ridges of the material. His eyes flutter and his disarmingly androgynous features flicker as Einar coaxes out a spirit within. Cut to Vikander, working earnestly and jubilantly, and The Danish Girl paints a portrait of true love with a sting in the tail.
The Danish Girl
comes to this year's Toronto International Film Festival with considerable
expectations and it's safe to say that the film meets them. In some regards, The Danish Girl surpasses them. The film
marks Tom Hooper's first return to TIFF since 2010's The King's Speech scooped the People's Choice Award and rode the
buzz to win the Oscar. It's very possible that The Danish Girl could repeat the King's one-two punch, since this exceptionally well-crafted and flawlessly
acted production rides the cultural zeitgeist. The Danish Girl delivers an accessible and inspiring film in 2015's
landmark year for transgendered people. It’s the film of the moment that the
widest possible audience can enjoy. While it lacks in representation what, say,
Tangerine brings to the conversation
using transgendered actors, The Danish
Girl is nevertheless a strong and respectful addition to an overall
cultural conversation, and it’s one of the dramatically satisfying films to
tackle the subject.
The film dramatizes the story of Lili Elbe, a woman who was
born into the body of Einar Wegener and paved the way for the Caitlyn Jenners
of today by undergoing gender reassignment surgery. Some minor infidelities to the book tweak the
picture and just bring the film a bit short of doing the subject complete justice
(to say would be to spoil). Fans of the book, however, will be pleased with the
adaptation.
The crux of The Danish
Girl doesn’t rest on the physical changes of Lili/Einar and Gerda’s
transformation, but rather the emotional ones, which explains why
straight-laced Redmayne still does the role justice. The impeccably focused
adaptation by Lucinda Cox takes David Ebershoff’s good (but not great) novel
about Lili and Gerda’s relationship and wrestles with the complex emotional
predicament of a married couple that creates something beautiful a new--a child
of sorts--that ultimately separates them. After Gerda invites Einar to pose for
the canvas, he assumes a second life as a woman named Lili. (The name comes
from their feisty dancer friend Oola played by Amber Heard, who thinks
Einar looks like a pretty flower.) Lili blossoms as Einar gradually opens up in
women’s clothing, bringing forth a version of himself that has been dormant
until now. Gerda, Lili’s affectionate gardener, encourages Einar’s first
transformation as a kind of girlish playdate. Finding Lili a pretty dress for
the upcoming ball is mostly a lark to Gerda, and she doesn’t grasp its full
emotional significance for her husband until the flower sprouts from the
ground.
Lili’s appearance plays as a coming out ball of sorts as she
accompanies Gerda to the dance in the guise of Einar’s cousin. Bashful and
restrained, Lili sparkles here as if transformed by a fairy godmother. She has,
and she owes a great deal to her selfless chariot, Gerda. At the ball, Lili
meets her own Prince Charming in Henrik (Ben Whishaw, whose own androgyny
proves a fine complement playing the butch to Redmayne’s pretty girl). This
moment seals itself in a fairy tale kiss. True love awakens as another love
turns to night as Gerda sees the kiss from the corridor and realizes the full
extent of Lili’s awakening.
Eddie Redmayne gives a remarkably strong and nuanced turn as
Lili. Redmayne easily meets the expectations set for his performance and he
even outdoes himself, as The Danish Girl
follows his excellent Oscar winning performance as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything. His
physicality and spirits are fuller and more complex, but the film also plays
into his peculiar appearance as the camera hugs his androgynous features and
caresses his nimble frame. It’s a brave performance on one level because
Redmayne puts so much of himself under the lens for scrutiny, and it’s equally
brave for the emotional channels it asks him to swim as he wrestles with a
Jekyll and Hyde complex in which the perceived monster within is actually his
saviour. The role tasks Redmayne with playing two selves while simultaneously
stroking and taming competing beasts.
His co-star Alicia Vikander gamely matches and exceeds him,
though, with her performance as Gerda. If The
Danish Girl contributes anything new to the wave of films about trans
experiences, it’s the moving story about the transition away from romantic love to unconditional love as Gerda helps Lili come fully alive.
Vikander absolutely devastates as Gerda watches the man of her life become her best
female friend. The role doesn’t afford her the same obvious physical
transformation or extensions of wardrobe off which she may play her
performance, so everything in Gerda’s transformation is Vikander’s own fire.
Her focus and ability to cry streams of tears of both happiness and heartbreak
at the same time shows the complexity of Lili and Gerda’s relationship as she
lets the man she loves die so that they may give life and freedom to tortured
soul. Vikander gives one of the most beautiful incarnations of selfless and
unconditional love ever put to screen, and she adds layer upon layer of nuance
and depth to a role that could have easily just been another throwaway wife
part. It’s a showstopper of a performance that outdoes Redmayne’s own astonishingly
good turn.
Hooper’s direction is equally impressive as he interprets
the adaptation similarly to The King’s
Speech by appealing to universal traits of the human condition, like the
desire for love, confidence, and a grasp of one’s identity. The scale of the
film is as meticulously crafted and ornate as Les Misérables with gorgeous costumes accentuating Einar’s
androgyny and Lili’s freeing femininity, as well as Gerda’s billowing spirit.
(The film easily wins Best Costumes walking in the door on Oscar night.) The sweeping
sets of Copenhagen place this tale of recent history in a fine wrestle of past
and present: it looks like old times in The
Danish Girl, but the film grapples with the sad reality that a perception
of transgendered people as insane, ill, and deviant is a very contemporary phenomenon,
if not an ongoing work. The Danish Girl
wrestles with the perceived deviance of Lili’s condition using a complex score
by Alexandre Desplat that alternates dark chords with euphoric flutters as
Einar tries to repress his true emotions and then hits emotional highs when he
sets them free. This complex love story is easily one of the festival’s best
films.
Rating: ★★★★½ (out of ★★★★★)
The Danish Girl screens again on Saturday, Sept. 16 at the Princess
of Wales at 3:15 PM.
It opens theatrically
in November from Universal Pictures Canada.
Please visit www.tiff.net for more
information on this year’s festival.
More coverage on this year’s festival can be found here.
