The Danish Girl

“Are you a reporter,” Lily’s ball beau asks, “or a poetess?” 

Einar’s paintings are reportage, the stuff of journalism—a description of the surface appearance. So are wife Gerda’s commissioned portraits. Her success as an artist comes when she goes beyond the surface and explores her husband’s hidden sexuality, when she paints him as Lily. In moving from surface to depth, from the apparent to the possible, she moves from reportage to poetry. 

Einar’s landscapes point in that direction themselves. His landscape subjects provide the opening montage and the site of the film’s ending, when his widow and old friend Hans visit the sites he had painted. One of Einar’s recurring images is a line of thin trees standing frail atop their partial reflection in the water. In the first series a wide-reaching skeleton of a tree is completely duplicated by the water below. Those trees are an emblem of the transgender hero, with a firm material image above and a shimmering weaker one below, the male persona with a female nature submerged. Whatever Einar wears — whether in clothes or in genitalia — he dreams Lily’s dreams.       

Gerda has been subconsciously aware of her husband’s feminine nature. When she first kissed him “It was like kissing myself.” She catches his femininity when she dresses him in women’s costume and when she draws him asleep. Even as she loses her husband she supports his movement toward realizing his true gender. As he says, “I love you, because you are the only person who made sense of me. And made me, possible.” 

His old friend Hans is similarly accepting of Einar/Lily’s duality: “I've only liked a handful of people in my life, and you've been two of them.” Though as a child Hans may have been attracted to Einar — “Einar just looked so pretty and... I had to kiss him! So, yes, I kissed Einar.” — his nature proved heterosexual, as wee see in his embrace of Gerda, though he never married. The film delicately presents the gender fluidity our society has come quickly to accept.
     That is proved by the easy success Tom Hooper’s poetic melodrama has enjoyed. We’re ready to identify with and to sympathize with transgendered characters, as we have so quickly come to accept same-sex marriages. Perhaps we’re ready to embrace an actual transgendered person instead of one safely played by a good actor. We’ve had some transgendered performers on the TV shows Transparency and Orange is the New Black,  but this film settles on a safer, more sanitized presentation. The opportunity for a harder view, a more challenging realism, is ultimately allowed to drift away —like the gossamer scarf Einar gave Gerda back.