Sensitive Danish Drama About Complicated Queer Desire

In the catchy Scandi-pop song that plays over the end credits of Sauna, Anton Falck’s “All the Pretty Boys,” the singer fantasizes about being prince charming in a world of beautiful men, immune from rejection. From the outside, that dream might seem attainable for Johan, a recent transplant to Copenhagen who has come to the big city to live more openly as a young gay man. His job working the reception desk at Adonis, a cruisy male-only bathhouse, surrounds him with the sounds, the smells and the sweaty physical sensations of sex and desire.

Even the more squalid side of Johan’s work — mopping sticky floors and wiping down vinyl mattresses and glory holes between shifts, when the dim lighting of operating hours makes way for fluorescents — seems tolerable when weighed against the instant gratification of anonymous backroom hookups, one-night stands and hedonistic queer clubbing. Those pleasures presumably were not so readily on offer in his hometown of Odense. Johan almost appears to have convinced himself they are enough. Almost.

Played with sensitivity and unwordly innocence by Magnus Juhl Andersen in writer-director Mathias Broe’s affecting debut feature, Johan is almost a unicorn in queer subculture — the tasty blond twink with a tight body and a pretty face who seems clueless about his value in the carnal marketplace or how to capitalize on it. That’s because all the meaningless sex does little to ease his yearning for deeper connection. But that changes when he meets William (Nina Rask).

What starts as just another Grindr encounter and threatens to fizzle before it even gets going develops into a strong mutual attraction, both physical and emotional. It’s a tender romance, distinguished by the refusal of Broe and cowriter William Lippert (adapting Mads Ananda Lodahl’s novel of the same name) to judge Johan, even as he repeatedly stumbles in his understanding of fundamental differences in the way he and his partner move through the world.

What almost brings their first hookup to an abrupt end is Johan’s surprise when they’re making out and William tells him not to touch his chest, which he keeps tightly wrapped while saving for top surgery. “I’ve never been with a trans man before,” says Johan. William, however, seems familiar with the situation, motioning to leave as he flatly responds, “Maybe you should have read my profile.” But Johan convinces him to stay, which leads to subsequent dates.

The relationship evolves in well-observed fits and starts, as Johan and William are drawn together and pulled apart by missteps. The natural chemistry between the two appealing lead actors makes their disagreements as believable as the magnetic force that keeps coaxing them to give it another try.

Broe covers fresh ground in his examination of the relative privilege that gay men in accepting environments take for granted compared to trans people, whose struggle to claim their identity can be hindered by ghettoization and financially out-of-reach gender-affirming care.

Johan has a horndog bar buddy who also works at the sauna, Asif (Dilan Amin), as well as good-natured Adonis owner Michael (Klaus Tange), who got him the job and a place to live. But he exists outside of any real sense of community. William, by contrast, has a tight-knit circle of trans friends who are his chosen family, essential to his survival.

There are fundamental differences also in their coming-out stories — William’s well-heeled parents are generally accepting, while Johan never found the courage to be open with his father, or to raise the subject again after telling his mother.

Broe’s own partner began transitioning while he was developing the film, which no doubt accounts for the personal investment — and equal affection — evident on both sides of the troubled love story.

In one of the film’s most poignant moments, Johan lovingly applies Testogel to William’s thighs. In another, William presents him with the gift of a strap-on, which he uses on Johan in a sweet sex scene with plenty of realistic fumbling before they find their rhythm. Only a queer filmmaker could conceive such a disarming role reversal, in which one partner explores his masculinity while the other symbolically surrenders his.

Johan makes a major blunder by taking William to Adonis on his night off without even considering that it might not be a safe space for a trans man. There’s awkwardness in the locker room as Johan strips down unselfconsciously while William hides behind a towel and keeps his shirt on. But they relax into each other once Johan finds them a private room, only to be interrupted by the angry manager, yelling “She can’t be here!” William is gone before Johan even makes it to the locker room.

With William refusing to answer his calls and texts, Johan attempts to move on, which proves hard. Tracking William to a trans club where he’s questioned suspiciously by the door person, Johan attempts to ingratiate himself with William’s friends, and while his intentions are harmless, it’s cringey to watch him pepper them with intrusive questions or make patronizing displays of allyship. Only the morning after their reconciliation does Johan apologize for the Adonis incident.

William’s difficulties extend not just to being excluded from queer places but to being denied support by the Gender Identity Clinic, which refuses to recognize that he can be both trans and gay. Johan is unable to deny it when William confronts him about having no idea what it’s like to have to depend on friends to share their extra hormone treatments. And Johan’s efforts to bridge the growing distance between them just seem to confirm their incompatibility.

Lippert and Broe’s script veers into more prosaic territory as Johan gets desperate and starts over-compensating, for instance by dipping into the door takings at Adonis to help pay for William’s surgery. This costs him his job and further erodes William’s respect for him. He hits rock bottom in predictable ways, trying sex work with an older businessman, or strapping himself into a sling to be used by a string of Adonis customers.

It’s also questionable whether Sauna really needed Michael telling Johan about losing his partner to AIDS in the years before marriage equality, which deprived him of the right even to attend the funeral. It’s not that the scene feels inauthentic, but intergenerational exchanges like this have become almost stock components in queer drama.

Still, irrespective of some minor script weaknesses, Broe’s good-looking first feature conveys emotional maturity and a wrenching depth of feeling, without ever tipping into melodrama. William isn’t perfect; his bruised demeanor can make him spiky, sullen and occasionally unfair. But there’s something quietly heartbreaking about the roadblocks in the relationship as Johan keeps trying to second-guess what William needs from him and continually gets it wrong.