The Danish Girl (15)
Three stars
Dir: Tom Hooper
With: Eddie Redmayne, Alicia Vikander
Runtime: 120 minutes
THERE is a lot resting on the shoulders of The Danish Girl. It is director Tom Hooper’s follow up to his Oscar winning Les Miserables, and Eddie Redmayne’s first headlining role since his Oscar turn playing Stephen Hawking. Plenty is asked of all concerned, but answer comes there barely in this handsome but underpowered drama based on the life of the artist Einar Wegener.
Redmayne and Alicia Vikander (Testament of Youth) play Einar and Gerda, a couple living in 1920s Copenhagen. Short of a model one day, Gerda asks her husband to slip on some silk stockings and heels. Thus Einar is pointed in the direction of his true sexual self, a woman by the name of Lili. At first amused and aroused by the turn the marriage has taken, the couple know that they are flirting with turmoil.
From the cool blues and whites of Copenhagen to the rich colours of Paris salons where Gerda shows her portraits of Lili, Hooper proceeds with a painterly, tasteful eye. Alas, he applies the same level of restraint to the tale itself. Wegener’s life, as set out in her autobiography, was not without incident. While Hooper touches on some of that, his insistence on keeping matters low key results in a muted picture that struggles to come alive, with Vikander the only true shining light as the wife striving to hold her marriage and self together.
Tom Hooper speaks to James Mottram in tomorrow's Herald Arts
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