The Danish Girl: The tale of Mrs and Mrs Wegener
COPENHAGEN, early 1920s.
Danish artist Gerda Wegener (Alicia Vikander) painted her own husband, Einar Wegener (Eddie Redmayne), as a lady in her painting.
When the painting gained popularity, Einar started to change his appearance into a female appearance and named himself Lili Elbe.
With his feminism passion and Gerda's support, Einar (or Elbe, if you want) attempted the first-ever male to female sex reassignment surgery, a decision that turned into a massive change for their marriage.
As Gerda realises her own husband is no longer a man or the person she married before, she must ask herself if she loves a gender or a person.
A childhood friend of Einar, art-dealer Hans Axgil (Matthias Schoenaerts), shows up and starts a complex love triangle with the couple.
This is the kind of scripts that makes Hollywood stars dream about Oscar nominations, and with Redmayne already boasting a statuette in his living room (we assume) for his work in The Theory of Everything (2014).
The movie is based on the novel The Danish Girl by David Ebershoff, which is a fictionalized account of the life of Einar Wegener/Lili Elbe, not an actual biography. The love story portrayed in the novel and in this film is fiction.
The Danish Girl opens on Boxing Day.
Stars: Eddie Redmayne, Alicia Vikander, Amber Heard
Director: Tom Hooper
Duration: 120 min
