The Danish Girl

The Danish Girl (15)

UK 2015  120 mins  Dir: Tom Hooper  Starring: Eddie Redmayne, Alicia Vikander, Amber Heard, Ben Whishaw, Matthias Schoenaerts, Sebastian Koch

It’s easy being cynical, but that should never stop us. Here’s another handsomely staged slice of period true-ish story Oscar bait, tackling what might once have been considered a controversial topic in an impeccably tasteful, unthreatening and ultimately rather uninvolving manner that permits audiences to feel smug about how liberal and enlightened they are in comparison to those ghastly non-PC brutes of the olden days.

Copenhagen, 1926. Boho married artists Einar (Eddie Redmayne) and Gerda Wegener (Alicia Vikander) are shacked up blissfully with their adorable Jack Russell in a spacious if spartan abode. He’s a successful landscape painter, while she struggles to flog her portraits. In a bit of clumsy foreshadowing, Einar gains tactile pleasure from running his hands across fur coats and folding up his wife’s silky garments. But the first real sign of a fissure in their marriage is Gerda’s failure to conceive, despite much vigorous coupling. She clearly wears the trousers in this relationship, so Einar swiftly complies when instructed to slip on some ladies’ clothes to double for an absent model. It’s not long before he’s romping through the costume department of a local ballet company like the proverbial kid in a candy store and tucking his meat’n’two veg between his legs in front of a mirror. Einar’s new persona is dubbed ‘Lili’ by the couple’s unshockable ballerina chum Ulla (Heard), and at first everything seems to be going swimmingly. Gerda finds herself rather turned on, in a transgressive kinda way, when mounted by a hubby clad in ladies’ undergarments. What’s more, her portraits of ‘Lili’ soon start to sell. But, inevitably, their relationship starts to sour. After gathering the confidence to go out in public as a woman, Einar finds himself pursued by priapic Henrik (Whishaw) and decides that he’d like to be Lili all the time. Naturally, Gerda is upset, while the poor hound merely seems confused at having two mistresses and a very occasional master.

This is the point at which The Danish Girl ought to get interesting, as it charts Einar’s journey of transition to become one of the first recipients of gender reassignment surgery. The early 20th century medical profession certainly comes in for a good crowd-pleasing bashing, as Einar’s genitals are painfully irradiated in the forlorn hope of curing his ‘perversion’ and he’s eventually pursued by men in white coats bearing a straitjacket. There’s nothing wrong with the performances. Eddie Redmayne scrubs up nicely as a lady and gets a great scene in a Parisian peepshow that might have taken the film in a more interesting direction. It remains to be seen whether protests about having a ‘cisgender’ actor playing the character has any impact on his trophy cabinet. Alicia Vikander also acquits herself well in the less flashy, arguably rather thankless role of Gerda. A rare gritty scene in which Lili is set upon by gay-bashers carries echoes of John Hurt in The Naked Civil Servant, but that was a much braver drama made at a time when audiences were openly hostile to any sexual option other than vanilla. So it’s a great disappointment that The King’s Speech director Tom Hooper leaves boundaries unsullied and emotions largely unengaged, pulling all his punches when it comes to any serious exploration of gender identity. What he has accomplished is the first film about a chap who’s determined to have his penis chopped off and a nice new vagina fashioned from the leftovers that maiden aunts can enjoy without blushing.