Friday, April 8, 2016

The Danish Girl - Movie Review

Einar Wegenar (Eddie Redmayne) and Gerda Wegenar (Alicia Vikander) are an artist couple in Copenhagen from 1920. One day Gerda asks Einar to stand in for a female model. Einar discovers that he actually feels better as a woman. His desire to be a woman takes over and he gives up painting, because to him, being a woman is a greater need. Gerda does not know how to handle this change, especially since her new series of Einar's portraits (where he poses as Lili, dressed in a woman's clothes) are getting to be popular. Einar prefers to dress as a woman in bed, even at parties and actually even picks up a boyfriend at a party. Alarmed they meet doctors who treat Einar's condition as schizophrenic or as dangerous.

The story is about one of the first sex change operations. Einar, now Lili, finally does go through a lot of pain to change her sex and finally dies but not before feeling a sense of coming home. Gerda is with her throughout. It's very sensitively shown, beautifully enacted. But if you don't like being patient or understanding of boys or men who want to be girls, you might not like it. If you however, understand someone else's pain that they cannot really express normally, you might.

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