The Girl Within

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.

Dog Tooth and the Classical Hollywood Cinema by Benj Ramos

image from impawards.com

There have been changes on the ways the film makers tell their stories. For commercial purposes maybe or just merely the influence of time, but one thing is for sure, film makers express their masterpiece in a not-so-contemporary ways.

Dog Tooth (Kynodontas) has been one of the films that deconstructs the "normal way" of film narration. Through its out-of-the-box scenes, the director, Yorgos Lanthimos, challenges the current (and even the contemporary) form of storytelling.

The continuity editing that are present from the classical Hollywood cinema is also visible in Dog Tooth. However, it lacks casual explanations. There are no explanations as to why a certain scene is happening. On the other hand, classical Hollywood films vividly present the story's cause and effect. 

This 2009 Greek film has shown the intersectionality between the contemporary form and the surreal/modern form. When it comes to cinematic space and time, we know that it runs chronologically. Although at times we feel that there are missing scenes, and it jumps from one situation to another without visual justification, the film still let us identify time through day and night and with no flashbacks and other conventions of time story telling.

In the classical Hollywood cinema POV, eyeline matches and shot-reverse shots act as a help to give the audience the story telling we expect. However, gives us headless shots, awkward head rooms, and weird mis-en-sine.

On the other hand, the films conformity to classical Hollywood cinema is present on characters. The family has been consistently abnormal from the beginning to end. We know that the parents are aware of their actions, and they were introduced to the film as who they are. Just like the classics, it is loyal to introducing the characters to satisfy the audiences' need of trait and character references.

Despite all, this Cannes winner revolves around the story of children who were raised differently by their parents. They remained ignorant and looks at the world in a way you can't imagine. They were saturated in false beliefs, deception and urban legends. This Oscar nominee for best foreign language deserves my 8 espresso shots for a peculiar film wizardry!