The Dan­ish Girl

The Dan­ish Girl may play fast and loose with most of the facts, but Tom Hooper’s heav­i­ly fic­tion­alised and unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly watch­able film about Einar Wegen­er — one of the first peo­ple to under­go male to female sex reas­sign­ment surgery — is so pow­er­ful because it pre­serves the cru­cial truth that its pro­tag­o­nist was nei­ther a guinea pig nor a martyr.

Based on David Ebershoff’s nov­el of the same name, which itself was a lib­er­al­ly cre­ative account of Wegener’s life, The Dan­ish Girl has all the his­tor­i­cal accu­ra­cy of a Xerox. But rather than under­line the obvi­ous courage required in Wegener’s role as a med­ical pio­neer, Hoop­er fore­grounds the con­vic­tion required for Elbe to be a trans woman long before there was a word for it. This isn’t a film about an activist, but rather one about a mar­riage, a man, and the woman he would leave behind in order to become the woman he was born to be. It may look like a tra­di­tion­al awards sea­son biopic, but looks can be deceiving.

Shot with the sen­si­tiv­i­ty of a Sofia Cop­po­la movie and the scale of a pres­tige pic­ture, The Dan­ish Girl begins in the beau­ti­ful blue-gray won­der­land of 1920s Copen­hagen, where Einar Wegen­er and his wife Ger­da (Ali­cia Vikan­der) are the hippest cou­ple in town. He’s a suc­cess­ful painter, fix­at­ed on per­fect­ing a land­scape of his child­hood. She’s an artist as well, albeit a much less famous one, her career hob­bled by misog­y­ny. Young, beau­ti­ful, and con­stant­ly touch­ing each oth­er, Einar and Ger­da aren’t mere­ly a nor­mal cou­ple – their love is sto­ry­book, their mar­riage like the epi­logue of a fairy tale. And then, one fate­ful evening, Ger­da asks Einar to hold the hem of a lace dress against his leg so that she can fin­ish a por­trait of their absent friend, bal­let dancer Oola Paul­son (Amber Heard). For Einar, it’s like a veil has been lifted.

It isn’t long before Ger­da is gid­di­ly slather­ing Einar in make­up so that he can attend a par­ty with her in the guise of a cousin named Lile Elbe (Redmayne’s gamine fea­tures make Elbe’s appear­ance all the more con­vinc­ing). It’s all good fun for her, but the flint in Einar’s eyes betray the look of some­one feel­ing the first ner­vous stir­rings of an awakening.

The film may be set near­ly 100 years ago, but it’s pitched towards audi­ences of the present. Lucin­da Coxon’s script adamant­ly refus­es to sad­dle its char­ac­ters with out­mod­ed notions of trans iden­ti­ty or demean Lili by hav­ing her doubt her con­vic­tion – even Einar’s child­hood friend Hans Axgil (Matthias Schoe­naerts), who might seem nar­ra­tive­ly pre­dis­posed towards a cer­tain strain of big­otry, does every­thing in his pow­er to make Lili feel wel­come in the world.

Like­wise, Gerda’s under­stand­able con­fu­sion is nev­er allowed to rot into spite, and the wound­ed love that emanates from Vikander’s sto­ic per­for­mance clar­i­fies this as a por­trait of sac­ri­fice and sur­ren­der rather than one of social jus­tice. The soft beau­ty of Hooper’s aes­thet­ic, along with Alexan­dre Desplat’s stir­ring score, fur­ther help to ori­ent the film towards the com­plex human­i­ty of the queer expe­ri­ence rather than the inhu­man­i­ty that so often crops up in response to it.

If none of this sounds like the stuff of a movie by Tom ​“I have a voice!” Hoop­er, per­haps the high­est praise owed to The Dan­ish Girl is that – save for a few nox­ious fish­eye shots in the first act – its direc­tion often feels anony­mous. Still, Oscar bait is the only way that Hoop­er knows how to catch a fish, and his thirst for melo­dra­ma often seems frus­trat­ed by Coxon’s del­i­cate writ­ing and Redmayne’s bril­liant­ly full-fleshed transformation.

The result of that clash is a film that feels like an exquis­ite poem writ­ten entire­ly in caps lock, each nuanced moment punc­tu­at­ed with a tor­rent of tears (either Red­mayne or Vikan­der is cry­ing in almost every scene). But Hoop­er saves him­self with an emo­tion­al­ly mea­sured anti-cli­max, cement­ing The Dan­ish Girl as a film that expe­ri­ences a tran­si­tion of its own: what begins as a sto­ry about hold­ing on ulti­mate­ly resolves as a sto­ry about let­ting go.