Ludvig Christian Næsted Poulsen Drømmedreng (A Boy’s Dream) / 2023

a better place

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ludvig Christian Næsted Poulsen (screenwriter and director) Drømmedreng (A Boy’s Dream) / 2023

 

Elias (Lasse Steen) has long been studying psychology, while his lover Christian (Christoffer Rønje) apparently is a wealthy businessman, who is often away of business trips. Together the two, in an open relationship, have been living a kind of dream life, with the resources to travel, buy expensive clothing, and designer furniture. They also appear to be very much in love.         

 

     Elias is beginning a new job as psychologist at a student boarding school for abused and displaced children. Don’t expect to much warns the school’s head, Sanne (Anne Louise Hassing), these children have been so abused that many of them are what she suggests almost unsavable; power is the major word among the teachers in the school.

      Elias becomes immediately interested in the newest visitor William (Bastian Hoe Friss-Topholm), a young child who has somehow ended up with a hole in he back of his head. The police are investigating the case, and ultimately determine his parents are the villains, the school taking the boy away from his home, which brings about an outburst of violence from his father (Tobias Maj Stelzner).

       Meanwhile, Elias and William quickly forge a wonderful relationship as the elder shows him how to alter the swing to the height which the boy desires, and offers him a belt to help hold up his pants. Later, he takes the boy on a day-trip to the harbor, where they both agree that they prefer the forest with its tree-tops to the harbor. You can immediately sense William as both a total innocent but an intelligent kid still seeking out the world around him. Power his no issue here.

      A few days later, after William asks to see where his new friend lives, Elias takes William on a visit of his own home, the child observing the beauty of his new friend’s world. And gradually, Elias realizes what he has been missing most in his life of luxury with Christian, a child whom he might love and nourish and offer a different life.

       He unsuccessfully tries to convince Christian to co-adopt the boy, but his lover is against the whole idea, prizing the freedom of anything that might hold him down. Christian moves into a hotel, whole Elias proceeds with the adoption.

      The final scene is filled will new possibility when William asks where are we going, and Elias answers, “We’re going to a better place.”         

     Danish director and writer Ludvig Christian Næsted Poulsen has created a quite simple but emotionally deep film in A Boy’s Dream, where we see Elias gradually choosing to give up everything he values in his gay lifestyle, as he begins to realize what is most missing from his own world.

      And I might add that the message here is not at all simply a positive one, but is filled with temptations and other fears as well since previously Elias has brought home a seventeen-year-old boy named Carl, whom Christian fucked; the age of sexual consent in Denmark, incidentally, is 15.

      But we are assured that Elias intends to bring up this boy with a parentally caring love that will give him the possibilities William (mistakenly called John in the last scene of this film) has never before imagined, even at the cost of Elias’ previously ideal gay life, even though the details of how he might do that as a single-parent are never quite established.

 

Los Angeles, June 14, 2025

Reprinted from My Gay Cinema blog (June 2025).