December 30, 2015
Page 9
Arts &
ENTERTAINMENT
Eddie Redmayne in
“The Danish Girl.”
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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