|
Based on the life of Lili Elbe and her book Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex. When the actress Anna Larsen of the Royal Danish Theater, who had just premiered the role of Orpheus in a new play, could not come for the last sitting of her portrait, the centerpiece of a new exhibition, she makes an unusual suggestion; that the artist, Gerda Wegener, ask Lili Elbe, (at that time known as Gerda’s husband, the artist Einar Wegener), to dress up and pose as Anna. At this sitting Lili is brought to a profound self-discovery, never before acknowledged. Like Orpheus compelled to look back at Eurydice, Lili can never again help turning away from her true self. Lili, despite the support of Gerda, their friends Ernest and Hélène, and Lili’s brother Marius, encounters hostility even from her own sister Dagmar. Finally, through the efforts of Hélène she is introduced to Professor Warnekos who agrees to operate on her at the Municipal Women’s Clinic in Dresden and help her fully live her life as a woman. After her first surgery, through a dramatic encounter with the King of Denmark, she receives a royal decree confirming her gender identity and dissolving her marriage to Gerda. As a pioneer of gender affirmation surgery, Lili endures the terrible pains and dangers of the more limited and experimental medical science of her time, ultimately dying from complications after a second surgery. During this journey both Lili and Gerda find temporary love in different quarters, Lili with the perfumer Claude LeJeune, and Gerda with the Italian Major Fernando Porta who will squander her money and leave her in poverty. Lili and Gerda, together at the end, declare their great and everlasting love for each other, which has never altered.
|