The Danish Girl – Blu-Ray Movie Review

This film is based on a fictionalized accounting of a real story that took place in the early twentieth century. The principal character is Einar Wegener (Redmayne) who is a painter in Copenhagen that is gaining some noteriety. His wife, Gerda Wegener (Vikander) also paints but her portraits are not selling. One day when her model is not available, Gerda asks Einar to sit in for a session. He agrees and winds up enjoying the act of dressing in women’s clothes. This event awakens his repressed identity as a woman. So Einar is then compelled to adopt her true persona, Lili. She begins dressing as a woman and going out into public all with the active love and support of her wife. Lili’s identity as a woman leads her to seek out gender reassignment surgery which is a new and untried procedure with uncertain outcomes.

This is a powerful movie with a deeply moving theme. The acting is first rate as are the makeup, costumes, sets and filming locations. The movie takes you to 1920’s Copenhagen and Paris in a very convincing display of cimnematic verisimilitude. It is really quite remarkable. The musical score is beautiful and near perfect in setting the emotional themes in the movie. I wanted to rate this movie higher than the three and a half stars I am awarding but, in viewing, the story disappointed somehow. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there was something about this movie that prevented me from stepping over the line and emotionally buying in to what I was seeing. Though I was entertained sufficiently and loved the acting, etc. I just didn’t feel as connected to the main characters as I would have expected. "The Danish Girl" is definitely worthy of a rental for the entertainment factor nevertheless.

I did not see any artifacts or anomalies with the video on this disc. The detail in the sets and costumes was delightful. The image also displayed good black levels and the colors were nicely rendered even though they were intentionally skewed a bit. It is unfortunately a movie that has a slightly muted color pallette, scenes with soft focus and a generally washed-out look. So the picture didn’t pop as well as it could have.

The audio was excellent. This is a dialog-driven movie which was well reproduced on the disc. I was able to hear all the spoken lines which is iportant because of the soft voices of some of the characters. The movie also had nice environmental sounds that were well reproduced. But the highlight was the moving score and how nicely it is being represented here.

This is a single disc package with the Blu-ray with an included Digital HD code. There is but one on-disc extra. It is an 11-minute feature – "The Making of the Danish Girl." This was petty typical fare with director and cast interviews with some discussion of the making of the film – locations, makeup, etc.