The Danish Girl

Cast: Eddie Redmayne, Alicia Vikander, Matthias Schoenaerts
Rated: 6/10
It is a sensitive film on an uneasy subject — a sex change situation way back in the 1920s when radiation of the private parts and exorcism were the only known ways to deal with what that generation considered an “unGodly affliction” officially classified as perversion and insanity.
But look beyond this bid for gender transformation, Oscarite Eddy Redmayne (Theory of Everything) scripts an incredible love story that happens only once in a century, maybe never again. That it is a real love story of a husband who wants to be a woman and a wife who loves him through this anguished metamorphosis is the main force of this fascinating tale of emotional and physical transformation of a man to a woman.
Not many may know that Lily Eble, the main protagonist of this sensitively made film, has been the driving force of the transgender movement across nations and ages ever since her diaries got published in 1933, much after “his” brave attempt to undergo a sex change operation which brought “him” death.
Played to perfection by Redmayne who takes you through his transformation with a tugging emotional upheaval but with extreme smoothness and seasoned behaviour, The Danish Girl pulls you in almost instantly. It is a heavy film in which the personal tragedy of a couple is on full display without hiding the punches of an unimaginable situation. Though Redmayne, as Denmark’s most famous landscape painter who is a man with a woman trapped inside him, holds forth, it is the amazing willpower and love of his wife Gerda that takes your heart.
Imagine a situation where your husband who you love to distraction tells you he wants to be woman and then, as a wife you support him through his attempted transformation. As Gerda, Alicia Vikander tells you what it means to be a seasoned actress of controlled histrionics. Besides being angelic in beauty, she completely captures your imagination with her explosive but undertoned unravelling of her complex character.
The transgender movement may have become commonplace now but in the 1920s it was a situation no one wanted to be confronted with. To the director’s credit, this uneasiness has been captured with extreme sensitivity on film and the ambience of the yonder Denmark and Paris used masterfully to enhance that emotion of misplacement.
But beyond all the uncomfortable questions that the film raises through this truly amazing story, it is a wonderful, emotional, sensitive and meaningful love tale that tugs at your heartstrings by its sheer simplicity despite being uncanny. 
Source: Sunday Pioneer, 17 January, 2016

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