Johannes Pico | Projekt baby (Project Baby) / 2018

the difficulties of becoming a good gay dad

by Douglas Messerli

 

Johannes Pico (screenwriter and director) Projekt baby (Project Baby) / 2018 [24 minutes]

 

Christian (Marcus Christensen) and Sebastian (Rasmus Hougaard), a gay couple, are seeking to father a child in whose life they might later be invited to participate as he or she grows up. But most of the lesbian couples with whom they’ve met seem far more interested in semen than in fathering or mothering their offspring.

    Now far from the city in which they live, Copenhagen, they have traveled via hired car to a rural retreat to visit Kathrine (Ditte Maria le-Fevre), Julie (Maria Aarup-Sørensen), and their young daughter Sofia (Elana Rønsbæk) where they plan to have dinner and discuss, after much on-line communication, the possibilities of one or the other being a sperm donor, and their possible involvement with the baby after its birth. They stare off, somewhat smugly in Sebastian’s case, in opposite directions.

   Their first impression of this small-town house is not necessarily positive given that upon the couple’s white door is the word “skrid,” which, in nicer quarters means something like “scram,” but in Danish director Johannes Pico’s film is translated as “piss off,” evidently a marker of rural boys’ feelings about having a lesbian couple in their neighborhood.

     Inside, however, things are quite cheerful, both Katrine and Julie being quite the perfect couple with an already perfect table setting. The only problem is that Christian doesn’t eat fish, which is clearly to be the central dish of the meal.

     Sebastian, the younger of the two of them, is warm and friendly, clearly the force behind their decision to seek out what is described in Scandinavia as a “rainbow child.”  The older Christian actually appears to be somewhat curmudgeonly and bit on the difficult side. Immediately, Katrine lays out the terms. For the first year, it will be just the mothers and then shift to a 90/10 percent relationship, obviously the lower percentage being the fathers’ (or father’s) involvement, two weeks with the mothers as opposed to one weekend with the dads. Besides, they are still are not sure if they might not simply use an anonymous sperm donor.

    Just as it is Sebastian behind the gay men’s determination to be involved in a child’s life, so it is Julie, the younger of the lesbian couple, who most wants one or two dads for her daughter or son.

    As they show them through the house and into the room they are planning to use as the baby’s bedroom, Katrine explains that she plans posters and drawings on one wall. On another are two paint swatches, one blue, the other green. Christian is clear to point out the she evidently as already determined the sex, obviously a believer of the old school that blue is for boys. Kathrine declares that “in my family we most have boys,” while Christian counters that in his family it is mostly girls. Katrine cuts him dead: “You might not be chosen to be the dad.”

     In fact, it quickly becomes clear that the two urban men stand at opposite ends of the women, who in their quite self-sufficient attitudes, far prefer the country. The women are delighted when Sebastian is described as a musician who has just received a quarter of a million Euro grant from a noted arts organization. When asked what he does for a living, Christian responds that he is a financial controller, not at all a suitable position in the liberal, left-leaning lesbian visions of Katrine and Julie. But actually he works for a large broadcasting organization, not as a nefarious money broker. “Sebastian,” as Christian modestly puts it, “is the star of our relationship.”

      By this time, the skeptical Katrine, utterly disenchanted with Christian, asks a strangely private question: “When did you come out?”

      Christian can even imagine what and why she asking such private information, she insisting that it is, after all, a valid question. He reports that he was 26, with her immediately responding, as if there were some pre-determined date to realize one’s sexuality, “That was late.”

    With that statement, we can already imagine her regulating her lover’s periods. Just as Christian is a kind of conservative introvert, Katrine is a judgmental controller, convinced of her own righteousness. These two individuals are now quite clearly at odds.

      When Julie asks if they attended the Pride Day festivities, Sebastien jumps it to proclaim that he heard they were wonderful, while Christian suggests that they had “other plans.”

       And when Christian goes on to explain that he’s not crazy about the Pride Day events, Katrine sniffs out his so-called conservative nature. Christian attempts to defend himself, an argument I am all too acquainted with, “It categorizes gays as men who only want sex and partying. It was one of the reasons I didn’t come out earlier.”

      Echoing the wonderful defense of Pride marches presented in Albert J. Bresson Jr’s remarkable 1985 movie, Buddies—arguably one of the most significant gay films of all time—Katrine goes on the attack: “I think the Pride is incredibly important. It’s important to show the world that we exist.” But Christian, again showing himself in our times to be an unenlightened gay man, argues that he doesn’t want to be defined by his sexuality. Her response is, quite frankly, justified but also unempathetic for so many men of the older generations who fought to free themselves from being defined by the narrow cultural notions of what it meant to be queer (John Cage, John Ashbery, Leonard Bernstein, and so very many others never fully publicly revealed their sexuality for precisely those reasons).

     Kathrine, quite avidly, dismisses his reasons: “People have to know that we exist, even if they don’t like it.”

     Christian’s response is that of the gay conservatives: “Do we have to force-feed it to them with G-strings, sex, and feather boas?”

     And Kathrine’s response is the knee-jerk liberal one to which I too subscribe: “Keep a low profile and let the rest of us fight. Then you can benefit from our hard work.”

     Later in a private conversation with Kathrine, Christian makes it even worse by presuming that all lesbians have cats.

     It is little wonder when, later in this now quite significant film, Julie and Kathrine reveal they would like Sebastian to be the egg donor, but what no part of Christian’s being involved with their daughter and son’s upbringing.

    They tell this, of course, to only Sebastian, who must pass the unfortunate news on to his lover: “They want to have a child with me. But only if you’re not involved.” Neither the characters nor us as viewers can even imagine what that might mean. And for a few moments, the distance and anger it puts between them suggests that perhaps their own relationship has been long on tenterhooks and, given their apparent differences, may not last.* Does Christian really want what Sebastian is so very committed to?

     But our prejudices, as this film makes clear, are not necessary representative of the whole picture of any individual. At the very moment when Christian asks what his lover is actually saying, the house is attacked with garbage and other missiles by local homophobic gangs. The noise itself is quite horrific, but the danger seems imminent. All the adult fall to the floor in positions of self-protection, but Christian quickly stands, running off to Sofia’s room to check on the young daughter of Katrine and Julie. As Katrine and Sebastian run out of the house to confront the attackers, Katrine immediately dialing up the police—who later admit, in their own somewhat homophobic questions of the relationships of the two men and women—that they can do nothing—Christian gently comforts Sofia, suggesting she cover her bruise with band-aid he first applies to her teddy-beat Oskar so that the young child might willingly accept it. Although both Julie and Kathrine finally observe just wondrous a father Christian might have been, they have already rejected his gifts, the truly tender love he might have to offer.

     Watching Sebastian attempt to clear up the mess thrown against the window, Christian soon after attempts again to explain how alien this world is from his own upbringing: “Sebastian, I come from the kind of home where a fag was something you smoked. And only women and homos had weak handshakes. I love you. And all the things that you want.”

      Attempting to put things back to order, Christian manages to swallow the servings of fish and is even offered more as an award for his appetite.

     The two gay men escape back into the world to which they are acquainted, escaping what might have been perceived as a bad dream, not so very different actually from what the equally

business-oriented hero of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours encountered in a voyage into the underworld of New York City’s Village life. This time, however, they look loving at one another, face to face; they have returned to their basic relationship of love. But actually, what this remarkable little film has revealed is the vast gulf, at times between the two centers of the LGBTQ world, gay men and lesbians, each of whom have their own prejudices and misperceptions of the other. In this case, it appears, the self-sufficient lesbians simply want sperm to help them bring new beings into the world, while the needy would-be daddy gay boys simply want to be understood and loved.

 

*I have purposely, I admit, withheld a couple of other truly sexist and problematic issues. For one, although Sebastian early on proclaims they have been together as a couple for 5 years, in fact, it appears, he has exaggerated in order to impress the lesbian couple. We don’t at all know the length or the sustainability of their relationship. Later in the film, as an aside, Christian explains in rather misogynistic locker-room terms why he doesn’t like fish. Seems he had his first heterosexual experience when he was asked to lick a woman’s “pussy,” and coming out of the event was served a dish of fish that tasted…well you get the absurd and ridiculous comparison without my having to explain it. His papillae were evidently influenced by thousands of school-boy jokes of their first experience with cunnilingus. I was frankly horrified by Pico’s unnecessary reference of this to explain his characters dislike of all marine delicacies, which I might mention are especially divine in Copenhagen cuisine.

 

Los Angeles, December 28, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2025)