Bad manners | 31 December 2015

The Danish Girl is based on the true (if heavily revised and simplified) story of Lili Elbe, one of the first people ever to undergo sex reassignment surgery, but while the timing of this is right — transgender issues are surely the next equality frontier — the film itself somehow isn’t. It’s OK. It’s probably passable, if you’ve got two hours to kill. But it’s repetitive, excessively polite and also, given the subject matter, surprisingly dull. It opens when Lili is still Einar, married to Gerda, and if the two ever came round for dinner you’d be mouthing over their heads: ‘Who invited them?’ And: ‘Oh boy, do you think they are ever going to leave?’

Directed by Tom Hooper, who gave us The King’s Speech, which was heavenly, then Les Misérables, which was 672 hours about a stolen bun, the film starts in 1920s Copenhagen, and, I have to say, it looks beautiful, with its painterly, soft blue interiors, white skies and gorgeous cobbled streets. Everything is meticulous and tasteful, right down to the women gutting herring down by the dock, who are so fresh and tidy and immaculate they could be serving in Fortnum & Mason. I am even thinking meticulous taste may be part of the problem here. This desperately needed to get down and dirty. Lili is not Einar in disguise. Lili isn’t Tootsie or Mrs Doubtfire or Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis from Some Like It Hot. In fact, the opposite is true. Einar is Lily in disguise, and we needed to go deep — to know how this feels, and to understand where it might take us, should we be brave enough — but we never do.