The combination of director Tom (The King’s Speech) Hooper and leading man Eddie (The Theory of Everything) Redmayne, as well as the undoubtedly fascinating tale of the world’s first ‘gender reassignment’ operation, ought to have yielded a beguiling film.
Beguilingly topical, too, in the wake of Olympic athlete Bruce Jenner and boxing promoter Frank Maloney so publicly transforming themselves, respectively, into Caitlyn and Kellie.
Certainly there was lavish applause from the audience at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday, following the keenly awaited unveiling of The Danish Girl. But it was the respectful response of a crowd who felt they ought to applaud, rather than an uninhibited hoorah.
And that is about right, for Hooper’s film, initially set in Copenhagen in 1926, is a good-looking, irreproachably worthy but emotionally undercharged effort to tell the story of Einar Wegener, an accomplished landscape artist who, with the support of his feisty portrait-painter wife Gerda, believed science might put right what nature had got wrong.
He felt he was a woman trapped in a man’s body and eventually found an understanding surgeon prepared to spring him from his torment.
Yet the film begins with Einar (Redmayne) and Gerda (the excellent Alicia Vikander) blissfully married, their mutual passion so much the envy of their friends that at social gatherings everyone stands around cheerfully listening to them talk about how they fell in love. They are the sort of couple who in real life would be utterly insufferable, but in a parallel movie reality are the toast of Copenhagen.
Lucinda Coxon’s screenplay, based on the book by David Ebershoff, seems at pains to assert Einar’s heterosexuality. But then comes the film’s pivotal moment, when Gerda asks him to pose in stockings and pink slippers to help her finish the painting of a ballerina. Suddenly, he realises that he feels more at home in women’s clothing; gradually, he also feels sexually more comfortable. And at first Gerda, too, is tantalised by the transformation. They attend a ball together, with him adopting the new identity of Lili. Both refer to Lili in the third person.
Redmayne’s almost androgynous prettiness lends itself perfectly to this metamorphosis. He makes a striking woman.
But, while it verges on the blasphemous to criticise a star who deservedly won an Oscar this year for his monumental portrayal of Stephen Hawking, he can be a disconcertingly mannered actor. The Danish Girl brings out the worst of this tendency; as Einar battles with his gender confusion, all the coy, fluttery glances and disarmingly sudden grins become wearing.
This is a shame, because Lili Elbe (as she became) was a genuine pioneer, and deserves to have her story told. But I went hoping to be entranced as well as enlightened by The Danish Girl, and I wasn’t.
Like both its leads, the film is a pleasure to look at. Twenties Copenhagen, and later Paris, are evoked with a painterly eye by the director and his regular collaborator, cinematographer Danny Cohen. But in a way that’s part of the problem. This is a tale of almost violently visceral feelings, which are somehow at odds with the calculated gorgeousness of everybody and everything. Even a shot of nurses mopping a floor is picture-postcard material.
There are some memorable scenes, such as when Einar visits a Paris peep show, seemingly in an attempt to re-ignite his heterosexual urges, but finds himself instead mimicking the feminine poses of the (improbably beautiful) prostitute.
However, The Danish Girl, though in some thematic ways similar to The King’s Speech, does not deserve to sweep up awards like Hooper’s 2010 triumph, for the prosaically simple reason that it is not nearly as good.
* The Danish Girl is released in January.
© Daily Mail