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‘Sauna’ Review: A Gay Man Sees Queer Life Through Another Lens in a Sensitive Danish Drama
Mathias Broe's Sundance-premiered debut 'Sauna' places two young, sympathetic queer men in a relationship that exposes the gulf between them.
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. 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. 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.
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