I decided to talk about the good parts first after the movie. I wanted to give the actors six stars and the movie three stars, so on balance I still gave it four stars.I know many people will be touched to tears watching this film. I also had two teary eyes. Once was when Lily came home after kissing a man and Gerda saw him crying and held his hand with concern. A true lover is like this, more than surprised, more than blame, the first thing that comes to mind is concern, fearing that you are suffering somewhere, being bullied, and put aside their own feelings. Another time was after the second surgery, Lily finally woke up from a high fever, pale as a ghost, she cried and said she had finally become her whole self, with tears in her eyes. I can’t help but be impressed by Eddie’s acting, and it’s hard not to be moved by this crying.
Eddie’s acting skills have improved again. Not only in the nude scene in front of the mirror. He narcissistically admires his own body, imagining how beautiful he is a woman, yet sadly sees his own organs, deceives himself to hide it, and continues to imagine that he is perfect. The design is truly exquisite. But what I want to compliment is all his blinks in the film. When he was still Einar, he was a more introverted male, more of a tomboy, smiling coyly after winking. After transforming into Lily, at first out of shyness and later out of self-release, his eyelashes flutter and then gently droop while his mouth contains a natural smile that is really flirtatious. Eddie made this character a woman. Every sitting posture, every walk, the twirl of a new dress, the self-pity when smoking, are real women do. Whether his female costume is beautiful or not, he exudes an aura around him, and that aura is called beauty.
Alicia is really good. In fact, I didn’t like her very much when I watched UNCLE or Mechatronics before. But here she succeeded. She successfully portrayed a kind wife, a caring friend, a woman who can not love but willing to give, a person of true beauty. The character is no less tortured than Einar, and requires even more courage than Einar. They are in the same bed, across a veil, and she reaches out to touch Lily, her former husband. How heartbreaking. She loved him, no matter how he changed, until he died. Her crying was brought on by him, and seeing him suffer made her suffer.
The film’s soundtrack is a perfect blend of the “Imitation Game”, “Unbreakable” and “The Great Fox Dad” soundtrack by Alexandre Desplat, a moving, delicate, string-layered score that softened nerves and pushed emotions to a cathartic edge.
The photography is also beautiful. The main characters are all painters, so the images are like paintings, and in such a fairy-tale dreamy place as Denmark. They tried their best to capture the most beautiful appearance of the protagonists.
But beauty alone is not enough.
This is what I said when I watched “Under the Electric Cloud” the other day, and it’s still the same sentence. Nowadays, directors are good at creating a beautiful scene, creating a beautiful mood, they have carefully designed the details to make people feel pleasing to the eye. People always love to see the beauty of things. But beauty is not enough.
The story itself is so unique, so unusual, so impactful to the soul. Think of a man with a beautiful marriage, a thriving career, a normal and happy life, who suddenly realizes his true soul, that no one is forcing him, that the choice is his own, that he knows exactly what he has to sacrifice and what he has to lose. Yet he made a choice, a choice that no one had dared to make until then. He truly lived for himself. Just think about how many complex emotions, how many twists and turns, how emotional it should be. But unfortunately, the movie doesn’t do that.
About ten minutes into the film, Einar shows his love for women’s clothing. There is no buildup at all, and that love is very strong, which is really inexplicable. Although he later says he knew he had a feminine side when he was young, one sentence is not enough to serve as a backdrop. And Gerda was not at all surprised when she first noticed that he wore women’s petticoats under his shirt. That’s all, but Einar starts wearing women’s clothes out of nowhere, and there’s no explanation of the process of his transformation, nor is there much in the way of his argument with his wife about it. It goes straight to the biggest contradiction – his physical and mental inconsistency. The director only used his constant dressing up, looking in the mirror these repetitive paragraphs to interpret, watch more will feel boring.
The film enters the second half, the audience’s initial curiosity about his gender has gradually faded, it is time to come up with the biggest contradiction, the deepest thing to cut out. But the director just continues to let the plot go on quickly, after the first operation, arguing with his wife, and then the second operation. The pace of the film becomes strange, and there is no need to cut it to two hours.
We all know that Einar and Gerda, and even Lily and Gerda, love each other, but we don’t know how that love is sustained; Lily is always asking if she’s beautiful, but we don’t know what she’s thinking. We want to empathize so much, but we can’t. The script is too shallow.
If not for these two actors, the movie would have been a frivolous vase. True love is not a work of art, true love should have more weight, so heavy that you can not come up with simple words to describe it. Beauty is not enough.
There are many people who want to be a voice for LGBT people and want society to have more tolerance and empathy. That’s all good starting points. It’s heartening that more films on these subjects are coming out. But it’s true that most of them are not of high quality. They are more often gay for the sake of being gay, or they don’t really understand their mentality, and are just a figment of the writer’s or director’s imagination. Sometimes the bigger the gimmick, the more likely it is to be unrealistic. It’s still a shame.Eddie won an award last year, so there is no hope for him this year. But we can look forward to Alicia.
