Lukas Dhont was inspired to make “Coward,” a gay love story set in the trenches of World War I, after he came across a series of black-and-white photographs of soldiers staging shows for their fellow troops. As part of the performances, some of the men would crossdress in order to play everything from can-can dancers to love-sick wives to grieving mothers.
“It’s a part of history that I hadn’t seen portrayed before,” Dhont says via Zoom in the days leading up to “Coward’s” Cannes debut. “That got my ideas flowing. I thought, ‘Wow, it would be really special to see these men creating a theater piece while in the background, there are explosions and the war is still going on and there’s death all around them.’”
The resulting film follows Pierre (Emmanuel Macchia), a Belgian soldier whose idealism curdles as he encounters the brutality of battle. As he becomes disillusioned with war, he embarks on a passionate affair with Francis (Valentin Campagne), a fellow soldier who stages gender-bending theatrical pieces in an effort to lift the troops’ spirits. Because of its historical setting, “Coward” offers a much wider canvas than the 34-year-old Dhont has painted on before. His previous works include the”Girl,” a drama about a trans girl trying to become a ballerina, and “Close,” a coming-of-age story about the friendship between two teen boys that earned him an Oscar nomination for best international feature.
“[‘Coward’] was the most challenging film I’ve ever made,” Dhont admits. “I was making a war film, but I needed to find a way to keep the intimacy that I love from my previous work. It was an exercise in trying to create a scale and a world, which is much more ambitious in its production elements, but try to keep it truthful to the emotions of the characters. There’s a lot of violence and brutality and men destroying or being destroyed, but there’s also a romance.”
The title “Coward” is loaded. On one level, it refers to the men who get so sick of the chaos and carnage around them that they desert their battle stations, even at the risk of execution. At the time, they may have been called cowards, even though their decision requires a certain level of courage.
“I wanted to examine our notions of heroism,” Dhont says. “In war films, masculinity is portrayed in a very narrow way. There’s this idea that fighting for our country is always a noble goal, and the fear of being a coward has broken a lot of people or led to their debts.”
With war raging in Ukraine and the Middle East, Dhont says those discussions have reemerged in Europe and around the world.
“I’m talking about the past but there’s a sense that I’m telling a story about something in the present,” Dhont says. “There’s been all talk about national service requirements being brought back. And it makes you think: What would you do? Would you fight for your country? Or would you try to resist that circle of violence?”
As horrible as war is, in “Coward,” Pierre and Francis only embark on their affair because they are thrown together in such an extreme and dangerous setting that cultural norms stop having the same constrictive power. Given the era in which they lived, where homosexuality was criminalized, they may have never found each other had they not gone to war.
“What’s really interesting is that in those darkest of times, they are more free than society allows them to be or that they will be when the war ends,” Dhont says. “Heroism throughout history has often been linked to a man’s ability to be brutal. I wanted to turn that upside down and talk about the amount of courage it takes to love.”
World War I may have ended a century ago, but Dhont says he’s surrounded by tangible reminders of its devastation.
“I live in Flanders, so I live on the soil on which the First World War was fought,” Dhont says. “When I drive around, I go past the cemeteries filled with the bodies of young men who gave their lives in order to to fight. Making this film, was nearly a transcendental act of bringing those stories back to life.”
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