Even the manifold mudbaths and bloodbaths of the Western Front can’t do much to dirty up Lukas Dhont‘s exactingly exquisite filmmaking in “Coward,” the young Belgian director’s third feature, and his first to extend his recurring interest in challenged LGBTQ identity to a historical context. Observing the burgeoning romance between two Belgian soldiers — one outwardly masculine but harboring a secret, the other testing the norms of gender presentation in the aggressively patriarchal military — fighting the First World War, the new film is clearly of a piece with Dhont’s previous works, 2018’s controversial trans youth portrait “Girl” and 2022’s heartbroken childhood tragedy “Close,” in its intimate foregrounding of vulnerable queer characters and the quivery sensory specificity with which it portrays them.
But even as it doubles down on the virtues of those previous films — among them Dhont’s sure, sensitive hand with young actors, his knack for bringing internalized emotion rawly to the surface, his regular DP Frank van den Eeden’s immaculate command of light and framing — “Coward” feels pleasingly like a step forward, continuing all the aforementioned thematic investigations without resorting to the kind of battering-ram tragedy or shock tactics that made both “Girl” and “Close,” for all their accomplished qualities, quite divisive. It’s not because “Coward” is focused this time on (just about) adult characters that it feels like the filmmaker’s most mature film to date. Meanwhile, his warm, delicate handling of, for the first time, an out-and-out love story should entice a wider audience to this Cannes competition entry.
Which isn’t to say that “Coward” is a particularly soft film. Indeed, Dhont dives full-bore into the visceral spectacle of the period combat movie, not flinching from the requisite blood, guts and disconnected limbs of the battlefield. But the mission of the film isn’t merely to tell us that war is hell: After all, we recently had Edward Berger’s comparably handsome “All Quiet on the Western Front” remake to remind us of that with regard to this war in particular.
Rather, “Coward” centers the tension between the severe terrors of warfare and the silent, interior anxiety of the male outsider afraid of being found out, countered with the bracing, buoying rush of first love, however inconveniently timed and placed. It’s interesting that an executive producer on Dhont’s film, Jack Sidey, produced South African director Oliver Hermanus’ superb queer soldier portrait “Moffie” a few years back; the two films have rather a lot to say to each other.
Someone who doesn’t have a lot to say, to anyone at all, is Pierre (Emmanuel Macchia, in a remarkable screen debut), a sturdily built farmboy with sandy cropped hair and a wide mouth that, when not clamped shut, twitches uncertainly. It’s some time before we even learn his name, given that few in his unit seem to know it either: “Tall rookie” is what he tends to be called, and he accepts that sportingly as he does everything required of him, whether lugging missiles off trucks or running into battle, clutching a bayonet with a fast but unsure grip. Only one of his cohorts looks at him a litte more closely: That would be Francis (Valentin Campagne, recently seen in “Case 137”), a gaunt, willowy blond who moves more like a dancer than a fighter, and makes no great effort to correct that for the army’s alpha male gaze.
A tailor by trade, Francis is also a skilled singer and actor, and hits on the idea of forming a small performing troupe to boost their fellow soldiers’ morale. His routines, which progress from lusty, macho singalongs to an elaborately conceptual drag act with self-made costumes, prove surprisingly popular with their peers and superiors: Before long, performance becomes his full-time military remit, with Pierre, initially roped in for technical assistance, among his supporting ensemble. Captured in floaty, powdery pastels that contrast sharply with the crisp, wheaten daylight in which Van den Eeden shoots most scenes, the performance sequences do feel like a suspension of reality for players and spectators alike, as the men respond with starved delight to Francis’ dainty burlesque of womanhood.
Pierre, though, is entranced by Francis himself, and the feeling is mutual: Dhont patiently teases their attraction through the full gamut of glances, from darting to yearning, though it can be hard to tell what is desire and what is merely heated physical proximity in this environment of constantly distorted, misdirected machismo. A genuinely swooning first kiss, though, shot with rapt, blissed-out, time-stopping intensity, is among the most purely romantic gestures the movies have seen in a minute — and from here on out, “Coward” blossoms as a love story of marked tenderness, but with a queasy, nervy undertow, as we wonder if it can possibly survive the brutality of war, and of men in general.
It works in large part because Macchia — a gently stoic, aptly unformed presence with a stolid sadness in his trudging gait, who can go from boy to man with a slight shift in the light — and the far more vocal, focus-pulling Campagne have chemistry visible almost entirely in the different ways their bodies move and balance each other: one still, one quicksilver; one molded by the men around him, one brazenly opposing that physicality. Dhont has a tactile, compassionate sense of how men — queer men especially, but not exclusively — watch other men, and “Coward,” by turns breathtakingly violent and sweetly, shiveringly sensual, thrives on that understanding, encouraging audiences to share in its pleasure.
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