The Danish Girl

The story of how Danish landscape painter Einar Wegener became a woman named Lili Elbe is the focus of this tasteful, no doubt sanitised yet emotionally powerful biopic. But, even though Eddie Redmayne gets top billing as the tragic Wegener, director Tom Hooper's follow-up to Les Misérables is actually focused on his artist wife Gerda (Alicia Vikander). It begins innocently in 1920s Copenhagen, with Gerda asking her husband to pose in women's stockings to enable her to finish a portrait she is painting. Wegener is intrigued and begins to experiment with cross-dressing, giving his female alter ego a whole new name and identity. Gerda encourages him, and, though the transition is painful for her, the artist becomes inspired, causing a storm in the art world with her paintings of this mysterious muse. But how far is Wegener prepared to go? The facts might be moot, but Vikander is sensational in that rarest of things: a love story about a woman who finds her inner strength while letting go.