Sometimes writing about something is easy, especially for someone who just sits at the keyboard being just another lost voice on the internet. There is a cause which stokes passion, something on TV which makes you laugh or perhaps even makes you so mad that you feel compelled to write something up or even just post on Facebook, stating your case in a few poetic words.

Words like “I cut my wrists……LOL!” or “What the f*ck was that?”

I’m too sexy for this picture, too sexy for this picture, so sexy it hurts!

And then we come to the Danish Girl, another in the list of shiny shiny chasers released at this time which nicely proclaims that it’s based on another true story because that makes it all better. I can pretty much some up the film in just one sentence, which doesn’t come up that often.

This is pretty much a couple of hours you won’t get back, should you watch whatever this was meant to be.

And remarkably it’s kind of hard going to even continue beyond that you know. There are just a few moments where I wasn’t even sure what the story was meant to be till a third of the film had wandered past our magic eyes, so I may as well try to explain here as best as I can.

This is the film by the way which has introduced me to Mr. Eddie Redmayne. I’ve not been familiar with his work before, having completely missed the previous Oscar Bait known as the The Theory of Everything where he showed how shitty it was for one Professor Stephen Hawking to suffer a disease which of course confined him to a wheelchair and on life support for life. Beyond that it would take IMDB to even bring to mind anything else. So now was the time to see what he was made of and if he was deserving of the shiny shiny nomination.

Alicia Vikander, also stars in this but there was a little more awareness of her as an actress as you last saw her turn up in the Man from Uncle, along with Superman and some other chap. So perhaps the stage is set for some real good acting?

Girder in the film…. Or I got this really wrong.

In mid-pre-Hitler times Copenhagen, Gerda (or is that Girder from the Iron-Bru Advert?) Wegener (Alicia Vikander) hangs out around with her rubber-faced husband Einar Wegener (Eddie Redmayne) and a dog. They both paint, they do various things out and about with friends, and then occasional do naughty trying to have a kid, or I assume so by the sheer boldness of Gerda proclaiming “I’ve had my period”, something which I’m sure everyone said regularly before the Nazis came along.

So far, so dull. I would have said bloody dull, but then you may have thought I was referring to the period mention again.

As there hasn’t been much of a story up until this point, it seems that life has something different in store for these bohemian pair of artists as when his darling wife gets ol’ Einar to stand in for a female model who was late to come to their flat to pose for a painting she’s working on. Then after seeing that her husband was wearing women’s clothes underneath his normal clothes, what do you think happens? No, it’s nothing that makes sense.

Because there’s a boring event coming up which Einar doesn’t normally go to, but Gerda doesn’t want to go to alone, they play a game. A game where Einar will become “cousin Lili” for an evening to make it more interesting.

In a twist that no-one didn’t see coming, Lili is left on her own, and soon there are rampant men wandering around trying to get Lili’s attention. Even off-duty Q from the recent Bond films (Ben Whishaw) turns out to be a randy b*stard as he takes Lili away to a lovely greenhouse type area, and then starts kissing him.

Look at him…. bloody genius

As you can imagine, or at least understand from the trailer, this all goes on more and more into the realms of Old Einar seeing what being a woman is like.

But during this, there was a scene which I just burst out laughing at, such was the fact I couldn’t contain my disbelief at what I was seeing on screen. Oh seriously, you try not laughing when you see Eddie Redmayne, tuck his penis and balls through his legs to mimic that he had a vagina in front of a mirror.

Go on, re-read that last sentence then you can come back to this point of the post. I wish I was kidding, that sh*t actually happened. I know the director and creative team were going for something which would have been an almighty struggle to come to terms with these days, let alone back in the thirties. But for f*ck’s sake, after seeing that, I just completely lost all interest in taking this seriously at all.

So after that riveting scene, you basically start seeing a split personality develop more than anything.  Lili seems to come out to play more than the original husband, and now we start seeing an actual story come out to play.

Do you think this will win me an Oscar?

Our dynamic duo of idiots next bugger off to Paris. Why? Well it seems that Gerda’s portraits of her soon-to-be-not husband which for some reason gets all the art dealers talking about her work. Come to think of it, it was never fully answered in the film as to why. Guess it was the sign of the times? Who knows or perhaps even cares? Clearly we’re not meant to think about it too much in case we get nose bleeds.

It is while in Paris that Gerda tracks down a childhood friend of Einar called Hans, played by someone who I had no idea who he was and had to look it up again on IMDB. It was Matthias Schoenaerts, whose name I dare anyone to say aloud five times fast. It seems to be because Hans had been the first boy that Einar had ever kissed and ….err…..the plot needed someone else in the mix to make it more interesting?

Turns out Hans and Gerda seem to like each other a bit and thus this might be an issue you think, or not really? After all Gerda’s no-longer-husband is well, not into her in that way surely now? The relationship seems to go into weird ways at this point, so quite difficult to say what the end result would have been.

One night Gerda and Hans kiss and then Gerda runs off. Thus ends the forbidden romance…. sigh….

With the doctors showing up, it turns out that this film was trying to show that the not-the-husband was to have one of the very first male to female sex change procedures (you know, the chop and then stuffing in of new genitals). Whether or not this is true, no idea. So towards the end of the story, this fills the majority of the time with Lili seeking to go full woman, all the time crying, smiling and blushing eyebrows at 50 miles an hour.

Lili being serious.

So what about the performances? Despite the aforementioned over battering of eyelids, the swooning and hell even attempt at being ladylike by whispering a lot to try and hide his deeper voice being a bit much, Eddie Redmayne actually pulls off being a woman very very well.  I must admit, to the point I wasn’t even sure who the main woman was on the poster to begin with. But seriously when that feminine smile of his turns up, Eddie only served to remind me of the Joker. Hey….why so serious?!?!! The rubber face mentioned before, just seemed to make him look less real and it just became stupid.

Alicia Vikander’s performance as Gerda was alright. That’s it. She turned up, did what was needed and honestly, there’s nothing more to be said. It sounds like a write-off but it’s actually really hard to equate the actresses’ ability with what happened on screen, especially given how she swings between suffering and caring over and over again about Lili. Was it love that made her so accommodating? Was it because there was nothing better on the telly to watch?

As for everyone else, a huge amount of it was all so forgettable. It’s true, anyone else seemed to just become a piece of the furniture, literally turning up to ensure that they were advancing whatever tissue paper had the plot written on.

This film was a perfect example of how to create Oscar Bait. It was full of strange characters, life changing something or other, and it was based on some true story stuff. The true story type stuff which of course would be picked up by all cinema goers expecting to be relevant, as the issues of being transgender is accepted more into the mainstream. Therefore it has to be good material? Meh, the Hollywoodys will love it anyway.

Let’s ride this bitch out, Thelma and Louise style!

But there were times where it seems obvious that Lili emotional blackmails his wife into going along with what needed to be done and I couldn’t help but feel that was unfair. Actually, come to think of it, everything that played out made Einar / Lili look like a selfish pr*ck. It’s safe to say that in reality the creative team were attempting to show that Einar was a confused woman trapped in a man’s body. But it truly come across much differently and in the end, it’s hard to have any sympathy or care about what happens. Except for was it time to go home yet.

Would I recommend this to anyone? No. It was pretty clear that this took away a couple of hours I could have used to pick my nose hairs clean or actually clean behind the fridge. Call me a philistine, but when we had far more compelling human drama recently with Room, you’re right in thinking I could have found something better to do than watch this. They could have done much more with the content and subject matter even, but nope.

So screw it I’m off to watch Netflix’s Ridiculous 6 just to see how dead inside Adam Sandler has become.