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Canberra Today 18°/26° | Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Review / The Danish Girl (M) *** and a half

LUCINDA Coxon’s screenplay based on David Ebershoff’s novel tells the story of a man in a happy marriage to a talented artist whose forte was erotica. Tom Hooper’s filming of it is many things, delivering an informed, sympathetic and achingly confrontational treatment of a psychological, emotional, even in our era scarcely understood condition involving a person’s gender self-perception.

Transvestism is not hard to understand. Transexuals are less easily empathised, often jokingly described as chicks with dicks. Transgender is more complex, involving a body of one gender that its owner perceives to belong to the other.

Roughly 90% of transgender people are born male but feel themselves to be female, 10% are born female but feel themselves to be male. Even that oversimplifies – much of the time such a person feels himself to be somewhere between the two. This information comes from a close friend who for eight years has lived in a satisfying relationship with a female-to-male transgender person.

Watching Eddie Redmayne progressing from Einar Wegener to Lili Elbe and Alicia Vikander as his wife Gerda accompanying him on that perilous journey, the surgical implications of such a case in the 1920s troubled me. The film refers to them without graphical emphasis.

If the long term implications form the film’s backbone, the story of love tearing two people apart provides its flesh and blood. Screenplay, staging and performances do the material great respect and affection. The depiction of period is charming; the fashions are lovely. Last September, the Guardian described Gerda as “the Lady Gaga of the 30s”. She survived Lili by only nine years. Her strength and her talent matched, even surpassed, Lili whose courage in confronting an unhappy reality was considerable. The film depicts their last years together with regret and respect.

At Palace Electric, Event 6, Dendy, Hoyts Belconnen

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Ian Meikle, editor

Dougal Macdonald

Dougal Macdonald

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