Danish Girl, The (2015) [Blu-ray]
Biography | Drama | Romance

Academy Award winner Eddie Redmayne and Alicia Vikander star in this remarkable love story inspired by true events from Oscar-winning director Tom Hooper. When Gerda (Vikander) asks her husband Einar Wegener (Redmayne) to fill in as a portrait model, Einar's long-repressed feelings surface and she begins living her life as a woman. Embarking on a groundbreaking journey that's only made possible by the unconditional love of her wife, Einar fights to become the person she's meant to be, transgender pioneer Lili Elbe.

Storyline: Copenhagen, 1926. Danish artist, Gerda Wegener, painted her own husband, Einar Wegener (Eddie Redmayne), as a lady in her painting. When the painting gained popularity, Einar started to change his appearance into a female appearance and named himself Lili Elbe. With his feminism passion and Gerda's support, Einar - or Elbe - attempted one of the first male-to-female sex reassignment surgery, a decision that turned into a massive change for their marriage, that Gerda realized her own husband is no longer a man or the person she married before. A childhood friend of Einar, art-dealer Hans Axgil (Matthias Schoenaerts), shows up and starts a complex love triangle with the couple. Written by Gusde

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Martin Liebman, March 7, 2016 Tom Hooper knows his way around the Historical Biopic. The Director picked up an Oscar for The King's Speech and helmed the Golden Globe-winning TV miniseries Elizabeth I, starring Helen Miren and Jeremy Irons. Hooper returns to the past for a very contemporary film in The Danish Girl, the story of a man's transformation into a woman in 1920s Denmark. The film comes based on the novel of the same name by David Ebershoff, a story inspired by a pioneer of transgenderism and one of the first known people to undergo sex reassignment surgery. The film has reportedly been banned in Malaysia and several Middle Eastern countries.

Einar and Gerda Wegener (Eddie Redmayne and Alicia Vikander, respectively) are artists -- he's a landscape artist, she's a portrait artist -- who are deeply in love. They've been married six years and yearn to have children. One day, one of Gerda's subjects fails to appear for modeling duty. She appeals to Einar to pose in her place. He puts on the model's stockings and Gerda lays the dress over his body. An innocent moment of aid becomes, for Einar, an arousing experience and a personal revelation. He instantly falls in love with the lines and textures of the garments, allowing him to feel his deeply held femininity. He takes to wearing women's underclothes, and after a night out, Gerda makes the discovery. She's accepting, largely, and as the transformation progresses she goes out on the town with "Lili," whose cover story is that she's Einar's cousin. But as Einar's transformation becomes deeper and, eventually, irreversible, the couple is left to choose its path together as Einar begins life as Lili.

The Danish Girl approaches its subject with a combination of affable, tone-setting and character-ingratiating humor and serious drama that takes both the characters and the audience to dark places along a journey of self discovery and identity. The film uses humor -- much of which comes from Redmayne's performance and Hooper's framing thereof -- as a means of not stifling the subject but rather easing the viewer, and the characters, into it. It opens the door and gently guides the audience into the film's more serious dramatic arcs and character moments that cover the entire spectrum of the transformation, from realization to admittance and from emotional acceptance to physical alteration. Neither Hooper nor his cast ever take the material for granted, approach it lightly, or, on the other hand, tread too delicately. That's what makes Alicia Vikander's performance so incredible and her role so crucial. She is essentiality the audience, bearing full witness to the transformation and, through her intimacy with the character along every step of the journey, on the front lines of not just the teases and the superficialities of transgenderism -- applying makeup, changing clothes -- but rather the deeper emotional sentiments and feelings that are the true driving force behind Einar's transformation into Lili. Further, the film is beautifully shot. Hooper accentuates the narrative with a number of direct, and occasionally suggestive, shots, but he's largely in the business of rightly capturing the dramatic nuances his performers so capably present.

Hooper never allows the movie to become weighted down in a sense of self importance or timeliness or come across as agenda-driven propaganda. It's authentic insofar as it aims to tell a story rather than indoctrinate its audience by framing a contemporary issue in historical wrappings. That said, there's no denying that the film will likely be received less on its merits and more on its subject matter by those on either side of the transgender issue, and for some probably without seeing more than a trailer or reading more than a blurb about its story. But the film does its best to remain politically neutral, at least broadly. Where it struggles is in its search for intimate character depth. While Hooper and cast craft the film with the aforementioned balance between light humor and serious drama, the movie never explores very far beyond the surface, though it does certainly push in that direction many times. Redmayne's performance is terrific, but neither he nor the script give him much room to maneuver the part to a more inwardly reflective place that captures the true, core, deeply held essence. Alicia Vikander's Gerda opens up more deeply than Redmayne's Einar/Lili, but maybe that's the movie's more subtle nudging, perhaps its way of saying that it's not the transgender person, but rather those around the transgender person, who may find a greater emotional challenge in the struggle between acceptance and rejection than the transgender person in question.

There's no doubt that The Danish Girl will polarize audiences and even polarize people who haven't seen the movie. Hooper's films does its best to shy away from overt commentary and instead focuses on telling its story. Performances are strong and Hooper's direction is silky smooth. It's a terrific movie on its technical merits, but the question is whether audiences will find the real, intimate depth the story demands or a more skin-deep experience. Universal's Blu-ray is unfortunately devoid of meaningful supplemental content; it only includes a broad overview making-of. However, video and audio are terrific. Fans concerned only with the disc's technical merits should not hesitate to purchase.

[CSW] -3.3- With minor spoilers, this reviewer said it better than I could:
A stunning movie, beautifully shot, and monumentally acted, as Einar Wegener / Lili Elbe (Eddie Redmayne) is the centerpiece, transforming once again as he had to for ALS-stricken Stephen Hawking (in The Theory of Everything ), and pulling it off as few, if anyone else, could. And the content is significant, calling into question not only how people act, but who and what they are. But I have to say Gerda (Alicia Vikander), who stunned us as a creation of man in Ex Machina, is just as magnificent here, a face so facile that it conveys emotion a thousand ways, a spirit so feisty yet vulnerable and spiritual and loving. I have to say the producers and director did not show a hint of condescension, or disrespect or a thousand other negative modes of ridicule or discrimination associated with gays and transgenders over the decades, centuries, millennia. Lili / Einar is pronounced crazy by the ignorant medical community, and beaten up by some street thugs just for his effeminate looks. And Lili's demise is in the act of becoming fully herself. Schoenaerts calls Gerda the Danish girl, but who is the piece titled after, her or Lili? It would seem it is ambivalent on purpose or just plain spiritual, as married persons at best are spiritually two in one flesh, as the Bible puts it, so they together form the Danish girl, as Lili tells Gerda she gave him as Einar the love and courage to become Lili. A wonderful love story, hopeful in the end as this phenomenon was starting to be addressed in a scientific and humane way, though its development was too slow for Lili. There was an Oscar for Alicia and an Oscar nomination for Eddie.

[V4.5-A4.5] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box


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