Coward
Viewer Advice: Contains suicide themes
Lukas Dhont’s stirring latest film – which won its leads a pair of Best Actor prizes at Cannes – depicts a clandestine romance between two young men that blooms in the trenches of WWI.
It’s 1916, and Pierre and Francis have been conscripted to fight on the Western Front. Nicknamed “Quiet Mouse”, the former is a handsome, brawny farmer who struggles to express himself; the latter, a tailor’s son, is flamboyant and creative. Francis is enlisted to direct a theatre troupe that will entertain the soldiers, a role that includes cross-dressing as the female lead. When Pierre is tasked with assisting the troupe, the pair’s opposing qualities draw them together – and collaboration evolves into something more.
Following the Cannes Grand Prix–winning Close (MIFF 2022) and Queer Palm–awarded Girl (MIFF 2018), Lukas Dhont crafts another testament to LGBTQIA+ resistance amid repressive circumstances. But Dhont is less interested in an anachronistic ‘queering’ of history than in holding a mirror to the homosocial foundations of wartime camaraderie. While returning cinematographer Frank van den Eeden (Small Things Like These) doesn’t avoid the conflict’s horrors, his camera observes Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne (Species, MIFF 2026) with an intimacy recalling Beau Travail (MIFF 2000), their undeniable chemistry fuelling an emotive drama about forbidden love on the front lines.
“Dhont has a tactile, compassionate sense of how men watch other men, and Coward, by turns breathtakingly violent and sweetly, shiveringly sensual, thrives on that understanding.” – Variety
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