Movie Review: ‘The Danish Girl’ Is Lovely, but Strangely Inert
With his lush settings,
yieldingly gentle tones and *exquisite sense of visual design, the director Tom
Hooper has developed something of a house style. Having directed The King’s
Speech and Les Miserables, the filmmaker has emerged as someone who’s less instinctively
*cinematic than *pictorial, not communicating by way of moving images, but by creating backdrops —
usually involving an artfully distressed wall — for high-toned, affecting
performances.
All of Hooper’s strengths and weaknesses are on display in The Danish Girl, a tasteful, tender but oddly inert portrait of the early transgender pioneer Lili Elbe, who when the movie opens in 1920s Copenhagen, is a modestly well-known painter named Einar Wegener (Eddie Redmayne). Together with his wife, Gerda (Alicia Vikander), who is also a painter, Wegener enjoys a life of *bohemian self-expression, if not *hedonism.
On a lark, they attend a party as two women, where Einar playfully assumes the identity of Lili. From then on, the character abandons the mantle of Einar, eventually accepting the challenge to undergo risky sex-reassignment surgery to “correct a mistake of nature.”
On the most crude level, The Danish Girl gives audiences a chance to see Eddie Redmayne transform himself into a woman, a form of gender-bending striptease that has been made much of in the film’s trailers and preliminary Oscar talk. (Earlier this year he won the Academy Award for best actor for his similarly transformative portrayal of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything.) Not surprisingly, the fey, boyishly handsome British actor becomes a *preternaturally beautiful woman. His Lili resembles a sort of Art Nouveau Jessica Chastain, *coquettishly posing and flirting behind shy smiles and batting eyelashes.
But the most *galvanizing performance in The Danish Girl is Vikander’s loving, confused, spiky and deeply sympathetic Gerda, who as a female artist and wife is grappling with her own set of expectations and strictures. The Danish Girl, it turns out, is less aboutElbe ’s
interior journey than about twinned artistic ambitions and a strikingly
progressive marriage, during which the two work out a modus operandi of living,
working and loving together, at least for a while.
All of Hooper’s strengths and weaknesses are on display in The Danish Girl, a tasteful, tender but oddly inert portrait of the early transgender pioneer Lili Elbe, who when the movie opens in 1920s Copenhagen, is a modestly well-known painter named Einar Wegener (Eddie Redmayne). Together with his wife, Gerda (Alicia Vikander), who is also a painter, Wegener enjoys a life of *bohemian self-expression, if not *hedonism.
On a lark, they attend a party as two women, where Einar playfully assumes the identity of Lili. From then on, the character abandons the mantle of Einar, eventually accepting the challenge to undergo risky sex-reassignment surgery to “correct a mistake of nature.”
On the most crude level, The Danish Girl gives audiences a chance to see Eddie Redmayne transform himself into a woman, a form of gender-bending striptease that has been made much of in the film’s trailers and preliminary Oscar talk. (Earlier this year he won the Academy Award for best actor for his similarly transformative portrayal of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything.) Not surprisingly, the fey, boyishly handsome British actor becomes a *preternaturally beautiful woman. His Lili resembles a sort of Art Nouveau Jessica Chastain, *coquettishly posing and flirting behind shy smiles and batting eyelashes.
But the most *galvanizing performance in The Danish Girl is Vikander’s loving, confused, spiky and deeply sympathetic Gerda, who as a female artist and wife is grappling with her own set of expectations and strictures. The Danish Girl, it turns out, is less about
For all of the *virtuosity of Redmayne and Vikander’s performances, and for all its
sensitivity and *aesthetic appeal, The Danish Girl is content simply
to present the ambiguities and contradictions of Lili and Gerda’s story, rather
than delve into their gnarlier corners. Just as Lili looks to gestures and
outward appearances to reveal and express her essential self, the movie stays
on the surface of things, presenting its *protagonists as *paragons of enlightenment, loyalty and love, but
leaving the viewer with the sense that the full story was probably far more
complex.
http://www.vnews.com/Archives/2016/01/DanishReview-ah-vn-012316
what : A movie named ‘The Danish girl’
what : A movie named ‘The Danish girl’
who : Lili played
by Eddie Redmayne and Gerda by Alicia Vikander
where : Copenhagen
when : 1920s
why : To show a man named Einar how and why
he wanted to transform himself into a woman and the different love between he
and his wife
how
: the actor and actress play well and realistically
to interpret the real story
*key word
*exquisite(adj.)細膩的
*cinematic(adj.)電影的
*pictorial(adj.)繪畫的
*bohemian(adj.)放蕩不羈的;不受世俗束縛的
*hedonism(n.)快樂論
*preternaturally(adj.)不可思議
*coquettishly(adj.)妖豔的;迷人的
*galvanizing(v.)刺激
*virtuosity(n.)藝術愛好者
*aesthetic(adj.)藝術的;美的
*protagonists(n.)主角;主演
*paragons(n.)模範;完美之人
