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About Portland observer. (Portland, Or.) 1970-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 30, 2015)
December 30, 2015 Page 9 Arts & ENTERTAINMENT Eddie Redmayne in “The Danish Girl.” Sweet Street Food Cart New location 15th and Alberta iMage Courtesy p iCtures f oCus call 503-995-6150 to place order Mon. - Fri., 11:00am - 7:00pm • Sat. - Sun., 11:00am - 5:00pm Wednesday Special: 3 Wings $2.00 Friday Special: Rib Sandwich, Beef or Pork, $4.00 Transitioning into Lili o PinionAted J udge by J udge d arleen o rtega Film tackles gender identity with wisdom, empathy d arleen o rtega I expect that most people will approach “The Danish Girl,” as I did, with interest in learning a bit about the transgender pioneer who is its subject: Einar Wegener, who became Lili Elbe, one of the first people to undergo gender re- assignment surgery. This fictional- ized retelling, based on a novel of the same name, introduces Einar (Eddie Redmayne) and his wife Gerda (Alicia Vikander), as hap- pily married bohemian painters in Copenhagen in the 1920s, and fol- lows their journey through Lili’s awakening identity, culminating in the surgeries. The film works well as historical exploration, placing you in a time, less than 100 years ago, when there was no concept of transgender identity. And as you might expect from his other fine work as an actor (including playing Stephen Hawkings in last year’s inferior “A Brief History of Time”) and his androgynous beauty, Redmayne believably de- picts Einar’s physical transforma- tion. Redmayne and the luminous Vikander have already begun to garner well-deserved award rec- ognition. But “The Danish Girl” succeeds best in conveying, with patience and care, a lived-in sense of a rare but essential human experience: that of undergoing, inside one life- time, a transformation for which there is no roadmap and which en- compasses an evolution in think- ing that will take the rest of the world several successive genera- tions. Not to minimize the obvi- by ously dramatic story of submitting to gender reassignment surgery when it was so untried -- let alone doing so now, 85 years later -- but these fine actors, screenwriter Lu- cinda Coxon, and director Tom Hooper (“The King’s Speech”) have managed to capture some- thing important about the soul and the evolution of human conscious- ness. On lives such of these, our progress as a species depends. In the film’s early scenes, Ein- ar and Gerda enjoy a playful and connected marriage. They share an artistic vocation -- he is a cel- ebrated landscape painter and she has achieved more limited success painting portraits. Small signs of what we would now term Einar’s “genderqueerness” go unnoticed by both -- until one day, while waiting for a portrait model to ar- rive, Gerda enlists Einar to pose in hose and a ballet dress. We see the subtle flickers of longing and recognition on Einar’s face as he dons these garments and assumes a pose he identifies as female. Gerda is unfazed when she lat- er finds that Einar has comman- deered one of her dressing gowns to wear under his clothes. She even encourages him to attend a public event disguised as a wom- an, for a lark, but Redmayne cap- tures the subtle but insistent shifts in Einar’s thinking; we see how he is more and more compelled to follow where this journey takes him -- until, soon, Gerda finds that it harder and harder to access the husband she loves. The film lingers longer than most would dare with the shifts in Einar’s perspective, and with Gerda’s confusion, love, and loss. Director Hooper has the courage to push us to sit with the magni- tude of what they experienced, at C ontinued on p age 12