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This will never make it here!

Danish Girl 2015

I know this movie will not make its way to this coast anytime this lifetime. Artworks using LGBT issues are a sure ‘no-no’ for the censorship board. The beholders of morality have no qualms in sweeping matters of corruption and another overt disservice to humanity, issues related to sexuality and sex would alert their antennas and they would go that two extra miles to ensure these productions do not see the living daylights in this country.

This film is an attempt to narrate, with artistic licence, as the story is altered to suit the audience’s appetite, the dilemma that a certain Danish painter went through to fulfil her inner needs. Eddie Redmayne (who acted as Prof Stephen Hawking) gives an effeminate depiction of Einar Wegener, an artist who lived in the 1920s who feels that she is a woman trapped in a man’s body. Discovering this when he posed in a female garb when his wife’s, another painter, model turned up late, fights the urge and seeks medical help who finally labels him as schizophrenic.

His wife, Gerda, initially thinks it is all foolhardy, but realises the gravity of the situation when Einar is seen intimate with a man. Einar’s old childhood friend comes to the scene who helps in their problem but also end up being a problem when he confesses his love to Gerda.

Einar, now Lili Elbe, lands in a Parisian clinic where she undergoes gender reassignment surgeries but succumbs to complications that occurred during the second operation of vaginal creation.

In real life, Lili had undergone five surgeries. The fifth one which involved uterine transplantation proved fatal.

The questions here are aplenty. Is there a genetic basis for LGBT? Is it acquired through ‘faulty’ nurturing? Has there been a baseline prevalence all through human civilisation and only now people have the courage to express their inner trapped desire? Is love independent of physical beauty and external biological feature? Can a woman love a man as a man even though of his cross-dressing and his chosen sexuality? Can gays be 'treated'? If they can be accepted into societies all through our existence, how come there is a need to correct this? 

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