The Danish Girl

Tom Hooper’s 2015 film starts when the painter Gerda Wegener asks her husband to stand in for a female model, and runs until Lili Elbe names herself. It is adapted from David Ebershoff’s novel, not Lili’s own memoirs, and the loudest criticisms follow from it. Clare Tebbutt of Nottingham Trent University writes that the film never hints at the intersexuality Lili described in her memoirs, and that treating her as an exception obscures the history of gender variance in interwar Europe. The novel also made Gerda staunchly heterosexual; the real Gerda was known for eroticised art deco portraits of women and in 1931 married Fernando Porta, who drained her fortune. Alicia Vikander won for actress in a supporting role; Eddie Redmayne was nominated for actor in a leading role, Paco Delgado for costume design, Eve Stewart and Michael Standish for production design. In 2021 Redmayne told The Sunday Times it was a mistake he would not repeat. The film’s Paris is really Brussels: Victor Horta’s house, now a museum, is Hans Axgil’s home; Parc de Bruxelles stages the attack. Copenhagen and London also feature. A good fit if it feels right that the weight sits with Gerda rather than Lili and the award went the same way. Not for a viewer after the historical record; this is a novel’s reading.