Today I head over nice and early to the venue of our dog
club’s winter show to meet the guy who has offered to computerise it. We huddle
together in a corner and whisper our plans so that the chap who’s running the
show today doesn’t overhear us. He had offered to do the same thing but his
terms and conditions were not accepted. All goes well and we should be good to
go for our event in three weeks’ time.
When we’re done I take the boys for an amble on the soggy
overflow parking field which I hope won’t be required. I count the cars in the main
car park. 85 in all, that won’t be enough.
L is brushing up her fitness doing her usual Parkrun and
Pilates as I head home and end up listening to Mo Farah whinging about his own lack
of fitness. He’s not happy but then who is? He sounds so like L. He was clearly
getting his excuses in first as went on to only finish second in the Edinburgh
Cross Country.
Then I listen to the FA Cup where Derby Reserves scrape
though to the fourth round with a narrow win over Hartlepool. Then to Broadway.
Set in Copenhagen in the mid-1920s, The Danish Girl is based
on the true story of the first person to undergo gender reassignment surgery.
Einar and Gerda Wegener are a seemingly normal couple who
are both painters but while Einar (Eddie Redmayne) is a renowned landscape
artist, Gerda (Alicia Vikander) is struggling to make an impact with her
portraits. On the surface they appear happily married and are trying for a
baby. Something which shouldn’t pose too much of a problem as they seem to be
jumping each other at every opportunity.
When one day Gerda is struggling to hit a deadline and needs
a female model but one isn’t available, she asks Einar to put a dress on and stand
in. When he does, they both seem to like it. From that point onwards Gerda
encourages him to dress up in her clothes and wear her makeup. She seems to see
it as a sort of a kinky dressing up game and indeed, at first, most of the time
it ends up with them in bed. When she catches him secretly wearing her lingerie under his
clothes, she likes that too and again they end up having sex.
They start going out in public with him dressed up as a
woman, now known as ‘Lili’ and no one suspects that it is really Einar. I don’t
know how well the real Lili passed for a woman but Redmayne's Lili was far from
convincing, undeniably a man in a wig and the only person he/she gets a
reaction from is a gay man (Ben Whishaw) who he inadvertently pulls. Which doesn’t
go down too well with his wife.
Gradually it becomes clear that Einar isn’t so much keen to get
his wife out of her underwear but to get into it himself as he becomes more
and more obsessed about what it would be like to be a woman. I find it hard to
believe this is how you discover that you are transgender as I thought it was
something you grappled with almost from childhood but what do I know. Perhaps
he did but the film doesn’t tell us.
They seek help for Einar but the doctors either prescribe
shock treatment or want to lock him up. Eventually they find a more open minded
doctor who suggests that Einar become part of his experiments into gender
reassignment. This leads Einar to submit to a succession of untried medical
procedures which will eventually kill him.
This may have started out as a film about a transgender man but
where the film actually excels is in its telling of the story of a woman who is
married to someone who isn’t who she thought they were.
Saint Gerda takes everything that is thrown at her in her
stride and that is some achievement. Gerda is not the successful artist in the
family and it is only when she starts painting portraits of ‘Lili’ that she finally
starts to get noticed as an artist. This perhaps goes some way to making up for
gradually losing her husband.
When Einar decides he wants to become Lili she just goes
with it even though her own needs are often compromised along the way. At times
it’s painful to watch as he thoughtlessly withdraws himself from her until eventually
he leaves her totally alone. Yet Gerda’s devotion to her marriage and to her
husband is unflinching even when Einar’s childhood friend, Hans (Matthias
Schoenaerts), expresses a clear interest in the sexually frustrated wife. Come
the sad ending, she is still there by his bedside.
This is Gerda’s film or more precisely its Alicia Vikander
film. While Eddie Redmayne seemed somewhat overwhelmed by his role, which seemed
to consume him and then spit him out the other side, Alicia Vikander totally
owned her role. I suppose it didn’t help that I kept looking at Redmayne and seeing
Stephen Hawking in drag, which isn’t a great vision, but there’s no getting away
from the fact that Vikander is fantastic here.
Of course in real life Gerda was herself bisexual and
painted lesbian erotica but this wasn’t mentioned in the film. Not sure
what the Academy Awards committee would have made of that.
We pop into Brew Dog, which seems to get duller every time we
go. We end up having a couple in the Peacock. Well I do. L only has one as she dozes
off in a crafty tactical move to reduce her units ahead of tomorrow’s training
run. I think she’s trying to manoeuvre me.
(Saturday 9
th January)
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