After the highly charged male-driven series of English language films – Everest, Spotlight, Black Mass – Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl finally lent a needed softer tone to the festival here. In fact, a different gaze altogether, a female energy one would be tempted to say, were it not that the film’s subject is precisely the sometimes uncertain boundaries between genders. Based on David Ebershoff’s eponymous novel, The Danish Girl is filmed by Hooper’s frequent DP, Danny Cohen who renders every shot in an appropriately painterly way, making watching the film a mesmerizing visual treat. It tells the story of Danish painter Einar Wegener, who in the nineteen twenties became one of the first subjects of what is known today as gender reassignment surgery.
The film opens in Copenhagen with young Wegener (Eddie Redmayne) as a soulful landscape painter. A sensitive soul, he is married to his equally young wife Gerda (a luminous Alicia Wikander) with whom he shares a Copenhagen apartment as well as an artistic avocation – she is a portrait specialist toiling in the shadow of his more established success. The couple lives what appears to be a charmed existence of love and camaraderie, which has endured into the sixth year of marriage. This is due to the couple’s deep affinity based in part on Einar’s instinctual feminine sensibility. A quality, which takes on a deeper meaning when Gerda, in need of a model, asks her husband to sit for one of her portraits in women’s clothing. On a lark they playfully decide to attend a soirée with Einar in full female attire. However, it soon becomes apparent that this is much more than a playful interlude for Einar who starts ever more frequently raiding his wife’s closet.
Gerda’s initial complicity also soon turns more serious eventually veering to dark concern for her husband’s growing gender confusion. As Einar progressively loses interest in his work Gerda flourishes thanks to the series of portraits of her husband, now going ever more frequently by the name of Lili; her work takes them to Paris where it becomes clear the loving couple is now composed of two women – one, albeit in the body of a man.
The times being what they are Einar/Lili is diagnosed as schizophrenic, perverted and insane by a succession of doctors who propose, and partly carry out, gruesome treatments in tune with the less than enlightened notions of the time. Hooper however obviously intends to address the less than progressive ideas of our own. “The film is about the inclusion made possible by love.” Said director Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech, Le Misérables). We live in an extraordinarily divided world, as witnessed in these very days by what is happening with migrants and war refugees in Europe. This story shows how for transgender people inclusion is made possible by the love that makes all acceptance possible”. 
Eddie Redmayne gives a performance that is equal to last year’s Golden Globe winning portrayal of Stephen Hawking. The actor spoke about researching the role by meeting and interviewing several transgender individuals, including a couple that elected to stay together even after one of the two’s gender reassignment. “I was profoundly moved by the hugely passionate love story accompanied by fierce fight to live a life authentic” Redmayne added.
The theme of love, as healing force was also addressed by Alicia Vickander who, as Greta, also turns in a star performance. “Like everyone I was attracted by this unique and passionate love story (…)  by the two leading roles and how they were able to transcend the roles assigned by society a pet roles by society”. If anything, from the vantage point of our age of Transparent and Caitlyn Jenner, the purity of intent and harmony of the couple could appear as glossing over some of the pain still associated with gender dysphoria and the stigma attached to it. However, with the country and the world ever more conscious of an issue, which appears poised to fuel the next great civil rights debate, the film certainly is a timely historical tribute – an origin story if you will – of the transgender experience. As such it is a poetic and ultimately lyrical telling of a story both intimate and important. No small feat.
 
Luca Celada
Danish Girl press conference |
Alicia Vikander meets fans

Photo Credit: Luca Celada/HFPA
Amber Heard also plays in Danish Girl |
Director Tom Hooper flanked by Amber Heard and Eddie Redmayne in Venice

Photo Credit: Luca Celada/HFPA
Amber Heard signs autographs |
Matthias Schoenaerts of the Danish Girl cast greets the press

Photo Credit: Luca Celada/HFPA