Why Indian film critics are wrong about The Danish Girl

Oxford dictionary defines "review" as "a critical appraisal of a book, play, film, etc published in a newspaper or magazine".

I stopped reading movie reviews sometime back as most had become 25 per cent synopsis, 25 per cent talking about direction and performances without talking direction and performances and 50 per cent the opinion of the reviewer.

The reviewers, by definition, weren't really reviewing films and I found no point in wasting time on them.

This changed after I saw The Danish Girl, which opened in India this weekend and decided to check out some reviews as the water cooler conversation around the film had been that it got bad reviews.

I had gone to see it because I adored the trailer, the director Tom Hooper is one with a fairly interesting catalogue; I had enjoyed previous performances by the Eddie Redmayne and Alicia Vikander and that the script for the film had been doing rounds of Hollywood for over a decade because many thought the subject was too explosive and I love Hollywood legends like that.

I went for the movie and loved it.

I thought The Danish Girl is a devastatingly delicate piece of filmmaking, with glorious set design and performances from actors at the height of their powers in a story...Okay this is not a "review".

Point is, all the reviews I read, some in very highly reputed Indian publications, had missed the point and fallen in the new 25/25/50 review mode mentioned above.The movie set in 1926 is about husband and his wife, both fine painters, one day decided to paint to paint the husband as a woman, which opened a pandora's box of suppressed feminine feelings in him. This sets off a chain reaction for the plot of the film.

The problem most "reviewers" have had with the film is that in today's world where we have great TV shows like Transparent and Tangerine tackling the issue of transgender identity really well, the film didn't do so. Well, no shit. The film is set in 1926, no one understood any of this at that point of history. A man thinking that he is a woman was thought of as a mental illness then, just like a random dude thinking he is from Mars is thought of as now.

Another point which most reviews raised was that the film should have been more about the emotional turmoil faced by the husband during his transformation. 

To this I say, first, we go to watch a movie for the director's vision, for the writer's story set in a world created by the cinematographer and performed on film by actors with the help of countless others. No one wants to know what a film should have/could have been from a reviewer, whose job is to, again, "a critical appraisal of a book, play, film, etc. published in a newspaper or magazine".

Second, in this particular instance, The Danish Girl could have been two movies as it has two very incredibly different stories to tell. One of the husband and his struggle with identity, a search and the pure emotional upheaval of waking up one morning and realising that everything you thought about yourself is a lie.

But The Danish Girl and director Tom Hooper told the story of the wife.

How in the face of this anomaly she wanted to feel her husband's arms, but couldn't (again, masculinity and femininity in 1926), how she lost her love while still being with him just as her deadbeat career was taking off, how her husband might be prettier than her...

The Danish Girl is a delicate film and like most it has its issues but it does its job, unlike some others.