The Danish Girl starts with calm and open natural spaces – a wide plain, tall grass, a body of water. Then there's a shot of a tree and its reflection in the water. It's leafless with a spreading, intricate structure of branches. The tree resembles paintings and drawings of Yggdrasil, which in Norse mythology is the world tree that stands for all of natural creation.
It's a good start, because the film is going to test the question of what is natural and what the word "natural" even means. The movie comes from the story of Lili Elbe, the first woman known to have sex change surgery. First recounted in a 1933 book by Niels Hoyer called Man Into Woman, the story was told again in David Ebershoff's 2000 book The Danish Girl.
For many of us, the idea of sex change surgery gets pretty sterile treatment in daily conversation. It's reduced to letters, as in GLBT. Words like transgendered pass by quickly, as if outsiders can accept the idea in the political arena, can mention it in civil rights conversations, but don't really want to get too deep into what it actually is.
The Danish Girl, though, goes well into what it is, and in this case it's probably a good thing that The Danish Girl is a British picture. An American film would tend to set up heroes and villains, but this film avoids polarities. It's more in the tradition of the great French director Jean Renoir, who never set up heroes or villains. He said – and he meant it – that "everyone has his reasons," meaning that observing and understanding are worth a lot more than judging.
In other words, The Danish Girl doesn't shrink from showing the human cost of the change that artist Einar Wegener (Eddie Redmayne) goes through as he becomes Lili Elbe. Einar and his artist wife Gerda (Alicia Vikander) love each other. They're sexually lively and playful. One day, in a teasing sort of way, Einar sits in for a female model that didn't show up to work with Gerda. When Einar puts on the model's clothes, his face changes – and so does life for Einar and Gerda.
Among other things, The Danish Girl is a love story, in which the two lovers go through incredible pain. The film never questions Einar or Lili's sincerity or honesty, or his overwhelming need to free himself into womanhood. At the same time, it honors the pain that Gerda feels as she sees the love of her life slowly change away from her.
A nervous film, The Danish Girl dances along the edges of what most people think is the immutable way of things. The social world here is entirely artificial; there's nothing natural about it – with muted contrived colors, and stiff, heavy clothing, architecture and furniture. Among the people who've never questioned the obvious difference between male and female there are even stiffer manners.
The second that Einar dresses as a woman, it feels like this world has cracked open. His taste isn't fabulous, and he looks like a big galoot in drag. He's taller than other women – and some men. His features are thicker than most women's. Eddie Redmayne is no Cary Grant; he looks like a person, not a presence from the Hollywood dream factory. He's a goofy-looking guy, and a goofy-looking woman. When a young man takes an enthusiastic romantic interest in him, you don't know what to think or feel about it. It's all off-kilter, and Einer/Lili doesn't know what to do with it either.
The only thing that's clear is that this man cannot bear to remain a man, no matter how disturbing that may be to Gerda, to the audience or to himself. The Danish Girl is a thoroughly uncomfortable movie. It's beautiful in its costumes and artificiality, but you don't quite know where anything fits.
Neither did Lili.
