a better place
by Douglas
Messerli
Ludvig
Christian Næsted Poulsen (screenwriter and director) Drømmedreng (A
Boy’s Dream) / 2023
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.
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.
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).