The Copenhagen sauna and sex club where Johan (Magnus Juhl Andersen) works is called Adonis, and he does his best to represent the brand. Tall, toned and tan, with a center-parted mop of wavy blond hair, he’s the very picture of Scandi male beauty — and a gay man who has never had his desirability questioned or challenged by others. It’s a privilege he must finally reckon with when he falls for William (Nina Rask), a trans man still finding his place in a masculine sphere that isn’t always accepting of his body or his desires. A thoughtful, tactile debut feature by Danish writer-director Mathias Broe, “Sauna” traces the awkward, formative romance that ensues between these two unexpectedly matched lovers, and is at no great pains to suggest they’re soulmates.
A director of several queer-themed short films whose nonfiction title “Amfi” won a Danish Academy Award in 2020, Broe teamed with co-writer William Lippert to adapt “Sauna” from a novel of the same title by Mads Ananda Lodahl. Yet it feels a personal project for Broe, whose own partner began transitioning while the film was in production, and who has spoken of his evolving understanding of queer identity. Assured of attention from LGBT-oriented distributors and festival programmers following its premiere in Sundance’s world cinema competition, “Sauna” will resonate with many under that umbrella who have had to confront outdated biases either in others or in themselves. On occasion, the film underlines its wider social points with a heavy hand, though there’s sensual fluency and delicacy here too.
It’s a physical pull, after all, that primarily binds Johan and William from their first meeting: an app-enabled hookup that the former nearly scuppers with his gauche response upon discovering the latter’s trans identity. (It was mentioned in William’s profile, though Johan — prototypically young, dumb and full of you-know-what — isn’t much for reading.) That the love story between them seems ill-fated from the get-go is more a feature than a bug: More than once we wonder what exactly these two men with wildly divergent ideas and interests see in each other, at least until the film’s explicit but tenderly choreographed sex scenes — shot with great care and grace by DP by Nicolai Lok, attentive to the fall of light on every fold of flesh — remind us of a magnetism between them that appears to surprise the characters themselves.
Amiable but none too bright, and shyer than his studly looks lead people to assume, Johan is vulnerable to the more superficial tendencies of an urban gay scene that still skews white and macho. A small-town boy who escaped to Copenhagen to live openly, he has managed to get a job as a custodian at Adonis on the strength of his image, while the sauna’s middle-aged owner Michael (Klaus Tange) has taken him in a lodger. By night, his workplace offers camaraderie and a frisson of excitement. Cleaning semen stains in the cold light of day, however, isn’t what Johan has been dreaming of, and he misses human connection that goes beyond bars and darkrooms.
An intelligent, perceptive literature student from a tolerant middle-class family, William offers him that, as well as a window into a more diverse, progressive queer world. There, Johan is unnerved to find himself an outsider — though the lines aren’t as aggressively drawn as they are when he casually brings William to the sauna, prompting a brusque eviction by his transphobic employers. Johan’s mind is open, though his attempts to engage with the trans community (and with the practical and political obstacles William faces in his transition) are clumsy and othering: “I just want to party,” sighs one of William’s friends in response to Johan’s earnest but excessive questions about hormone therapy. Among its other lessons, “Sauna” serves as a reminder to queer people and queer allies alike that “doing the work” shouldn’t mean asking others to do it for you.
As Johan and William’s relationship splinters, Broe and Lippert’s script loses focus a bit, sending Johan into a somewhat repetitive spiral of destructive behavior — while a pivot that equates sex work with an emotional nadir seems drafted in from a more old-fashioned, less enlightened queer story. A pair of nervy, bruised lead performances keep things credible, however: Trans comedian Rask is particularly affecting as a man nearly as weary of others’ kid-gloved acceptance as he is of outright abuse. “I want to be with you, but I’m only just figuring out how to be with myself,” William says in sheer exasperation to Johan, articulating a circle that “Sauna” is right to never tidily square.
