The Danish Girl (2015)
Director: Tom Hooper
Entertainment grade: C+
History grade: D
Lili Elbe (born Einar Wegener) was a Danish painter. Suffering physical and psychological distress, she believed she had been misidentified as a man. She underwent an early form of gender reassignment surgery in 1930.
Identity
The film begins in Copenhagen in 1926. Einar (Eddie Redmayne) is a successful artist and virile husband to fellow painter Gerda (Alicia Vikander). One day, a model is late. Gerda asks Einar to pose, wearing the silk stockings and glittery shoes of a dancer. This triggers a gender identity crisis, culminating in Einar becoming Lili. Can slipping on a pair of silk stockings make you transgender? No. The incident is drawn from Man into Woman, a memoir compiled from Lili’s diaries after her death by an editor, “Niels Hoyer” (really Ernst Ludwig Jacobson). In the memoir, it’s presented as part of a chain of events rather than the decisive moment in Einar’s transition to Lili – though it was, as in the film, the moment she received her new name.
Age
When Gerda is offered representation by an art dealer in Paris, the couple go together. Einar spends more and more time as Lili. In real life, Lili and Gerda moved to Paris in 1912, when they were 30 and 26 respectively. By 1926, when this film begins, they would have been 44 and 40. By 1930, when Lili embarked on surgery, they were 48 and 44. The film’s reasons for shortening this timeline and “freezing” them at their younger ages may be casting and/or storytelling. It’s a tighter plot if it happens over the course of just five years, though the real Lili’s story spanned two decades.
Freedom
The film shows Lili as a recluse in Paris. Gerda, confused and despairing, attempts to resist her heterosexual attraction to Lili’s fictional childhood friend Hans (Matthias Schoenaerts). In real life, the situation was less conventional still: Lili and Gerda lived as an out lesbian couple. They were not miserable or reclusive. After they moved, Lili wrote: “A few happy and harmonious years were now in store for Grete [Gerda] and me.” Except for the camera seeming to share some of Lili’s pleasure in fabrics, the film feels drained of joy or passion. If anything, the elegant construction of its visuals becomes almost as oppressive as the society it assumes surrounded these women (a scene in which Lili is beaten up by two men has been invented). Paris was remarkably liberal in the 1910s and 1920s – which was exactly why Gerda and Lili settled there. It wasn’t all plain sailing, but the two of them seem to have had quite a lot of fun.
Sex
The Danish Girl has amalgamated the two most important doctors who treated Lili, sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and surgeon Kurt Warnekros. It also depicts Lili as male-bodied. From her memoir it seems she may have been intersex, with a combination of male and female reproductive organs: ovaries may have been found when she was operated upon, in addition to her testicles. Unfortunately, it is impossible to see her medical records, made at the time by Hirschfeld at the German Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sex Research). When the Nazis came into power in 1933, they burned the entire archive and library of the Institut as part of their anti-homosexuality campaign. Hirschfeld (who was Jewish and in a polyamorous relationship with a Chinese man, thereby offending the Nazis several times over) was abroad when they did it. He remained in exile for the rest of his life.
Romance
The film condenses the five surgical operations the real Lili underwent into just two: one to remove masculine parts, one to create feminine ones. After the first operation, during which Lili had her testicles removed, her marriage to Gerda was annulled. The film extends their relationship, leaving out both of their subsequent male partners. In real life, Gerda had already remarried before Lili underwent the last of her operations.
Politics
There has been controversy over the casting of cisgender (non-trans) man Eddie Redmayne as a trans woman. Lili’s story as seen on the screen has been processed by a series of cis men, including “Niels Hoyer”, her editor; David Ebershoff, the novelist who wrote the fictionalised version of Lili’s life on which this film is based; and Tom Hooper, the film’s director. Hooper has said: “I would champion any shift where the industry embraces trans actors, and celebrates trans film-makers.” This film is at pains to be sensitive to its subject, but it was not made by trans people. With trans actors such as Laverne Cox and Alexandra Billings and gender non-conforming actors such as Ruby Rose becoming prominent, producers may one day stop being able to claim that they can’t find a trans actor with the box-office draw of Eddie Redmayne.
Verdict
The Danish Girl is a well-intentioned attempt to tell Lili Elbe’s story for a general audience, though some of the quirkier historical facts and a lot of the sparkle have been lost. Dramatically, it maintains too much poise to allow the real Lili’s warmth to come through.
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