Eddie Redmayne's winsome smile works much too hard in The Danish Girl. His Lili Elbe, one of the first people in the world to undergo gender reassignment surgery, is a very coy creation. The smile and the poses that go with it make femaleness seem like a set of mannerisms rather than a fundamental aspect of one's sense of self.

The film has been 15 years in the making. Lucinda Coxon began drafting the screenplay a few years after David Ebershoff​'s novel about Elbe came out in 2000 and a few directors have been tempted. Lasse Hallstrom would probably have kept the Redmayne smile even more busily employed but his fellow Swede, Tomas Alfredson, who went on to do the superlative Le Carre adaptation, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, might have dug deeper. Tom Hooper, who eventually stepped up, has made a film which delights the eye but doesn't really get to the heart of things. It's exquisitely designed, evoking the story's time and place with all the richness and precision that Hooper brought to pre-war Britain in The King's Speech. But Lili herself eludes him.

In the 1920s, when she first begins to consider the surgery, the world knows Lili as Einar Wegener​, a successful Copenhagen landscape painter, happily married to Gerda (Alicia Vikander), a fellow artist who concentrates on portraits.

It's one of Gerda's portraits which helps to precipitate the emergence of Lili. Because her model is going to be late, Gerda asks her husband to put on the dress she is about to paint. She then suggests that they go to the artists' ball together with him in women's clothes and see how their bohemian friends react. For her, it is a game. For him, it's an apotheosis. Now that Lili has emerged, she will not be put aside. To Gerda's dismay, her beloved husband proceeds to disappear into the woman he has always wanted to be. The confident figure in the black suit, starched collar and Homburg becomes a demure woman who speaks of Einar as if he were a person she once knew.