Coward

Belgian filmmaker Lukas Dhont (Girl) brings his delicate, gauzy touch to the muddy hell of World War I with his third film, a gay love story about a young recruit who finds horror and hope in the trenches. It doesn’t hit the heights of Close, his quiet elegy to young friendship, but it’s another gently moving exploration of young men clutching onto their sense of self in traumatic circumstances.

Inspired by a photo of a Great War soldier in women’s clothing, Dhont introduces his young Belgian recruit, Pierre (Emmanuel Macchia), to a troupe of performers led by the exuberant Francis (Valentin Campagne). The pair couldn’t be more dissimilar: a farmer so taciturn his comrades call him ‘Quiet Mouse’, and the flamboyant, livewire tailor’s son, who is assembling a theatrical performance behind the lines from the meagrest of elements: an old barn, some set decoration and a cast of support troops who call themselves the ‘band of rejects’. Love blossoms between them in snatched moments, captured with gentle grace by Dhont. 

The strain of war is always there. With cinematographer Frank van den Eeden’s up-close camera slogging through the mud alongside Pierre, you can feel the brutalising effect of this blackened landscape – of lugging shells to the front and hauling bodies to mass graves. And you can sense how the corpse-burying truces in No Man’s Land might leave a man contemplating self-harm with a borrowed bayonet. The film sometimes moves like it’s wading through the Flanders mud, too.

It sometimes moves like it’s wading through the Flanders mud

Unlike the cross-dressing POWs in Jean Renoir’s World War I classic Grand Illusion, performance art is an act of resistance aimed more generally in Coward, not just at the hated ‘Huns’ but at the war as a whole. The young men sing stirring, lovelorn songs and play subversively with gender fluidity in a way that’s only tolerated because their revue show is a morale-booster. There’s a simmering tension beneath this exchange of army uniforms for slinky dresses and rouged cheeks. When Francis sings at an officers’ dinner where he’s sneered at and slurred, it nearly comes to the boil. 

But Coward is not a film about homophobia in the military (try Oliver Hermanus’s bruising Moffie for that), and it’s not a conventional war film either. At least, not in the sense of big battles and courage or cowardice under fire, which will disappoint anyone looking for a sort of ‘All Queer on the Western Front’. Its urge to find beauty in the wreckage of war has a forced quality, a romanticism at odds with this grim world. 

Still, with LGBTQ+ stories so rare in the filmography of World War I, it’s a rare and welcome perspective – as well as another showcase for a gifted young filmmaker. 

Coward premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.