A take on the film The Danish Girl
by Love Esios
I have always been an enthusiast of visual and performance arts ever since I was in elementary. Though I was not gifted with the ability to draw straight lines and create accurate curves, I've always wondered what could have been in the mind of an artist while he/she was creating his/her masterpiece. Such vivid and powerful imagination behind that small ball of tissue.
In the movie The Danish Girl, that vivid and highly creative imagination would be found lingering inside the brain of Einar Wegener (portrayed by Eddie Redmayne). Einar used to be a highly respected and talented painters of his time until he found something else inside him -- Lily. His wife, Gerda (portrayed by Alicia Vikander) treated the whole circumstance as a role play until his husband couldn't hide his true identity anymore. And so, the painful process of losing her husband began... and it ended with Einar becoming Lily who underwent one of the first sex-change operations in history.
It's a beauty and a struggle seeing Eddie Redmayne portray Einar and Lily respectively. At the beginning of the movie, you would immediately observe the tenderness in his demeanor. I can imagine Einar being lost in his own world while working on his canvass. You can see in his eyes the love that he has for his wife. And the struggle from within him when he first realized that there is something wrong with him. The conflicting and inconvenient truth that he is Lily and that Einar is just a tiny figment of his own self. When he began the process of transforming to Lily, I found him really beautiful. It's hard to imagine that almost two years ago, Redmayne portrayed a character with motor neuron disease. His flexibility to give life to two different characters had earned him a nod to the Oscars.
Alicia Vikander was also amazing as Gerda. She was fierce, determined and her love for Einar -- unconditional. It made me think how sick and tragic it was to love someone who couldn't love you back. That she has lost her husband to a character that she had just imagined. If that was what really happened, you could also argue that perhaps Gerda also have that homosexual tendency because most of her art work were a reflection of what was also going through her mind.
Shot in the backdrop of 1920s Copenhagen, this riveting story of Einar and Gerda and the liberation of their own personalities would make you think of the real meaning of love, life and freedom that goes beyond one's gender preference.
As powerful as the message that director Tom Hooper wants to convey through this film, I'll give this a film a shot of 8 espressos.
