The trenches of World War I paved the way for strange longing in Lukas Dhont’s work cowardthe film that competed in Cannes, and which – despite its many flaws – won its main actors the Prix d’interprétation masculine, or best actor award. The trophy was well deserved, not only despite, but perhaps also because of, Dont’s distorted drama, forcing superstars Emanuele Macchia and Valentin Campani to conjure depth and text from the ether; Movie magic comes in many forms.
Macchia plays young Belgian Pierre, a caricatured farm boy whose broad drawing is made immediately effective by the actor’s poignant naivete. Practically lost on the front lines, the character’s forced smiles are betrayed by his piercing eyes, which always seem to be searching for something—either a way out of his country’s harsh wartime predicament, or some way to formulate the right questions about himself in the first place, and his position in the hypermasculine military hierarchy.
Pierre first lays eyes on the slender, boisterous Francis (Campagna) when the latter – his stomach stuffed to appear pregnant – is comically carried into the men’s makeshift dining hall for a pantomime of childbirth, spread eagle across the lunch table. A scene full of boyish energy, part joke and part celebration, because one of their buddies has just become a father. However, Dhont’s camera can’t help but catch Pierre’s nosy antics every so often. The former farmhand seems to love the façade and bawdy camp (not to mention Frances’s uninhibited confidence in the performance of femininity), though he’s far from pondering why.
This paves the way for Pierre to be lured away from the mud, guns, blood, and bombs, and toward Francis’ unit: a group of young men tasked with entertaining their fellow countrymen recruited across the European front to boost their morale. In scenes of wartime chaos, Dhont and cinematographer Frank van den Eeden craft a harrowing intensity in the dead of night, the palpable danger of an unseen enemy, matched only by what young soldiers become too frightened or damaged to carry out their orders. They are labeled as deserters and executed by their superiors, further cementing the walls put up around Pierre should he consider leaving.
Like a straight war movie, coward Mostly works. To match the explosion of the battlefield, it summons a raucous energy as Frances’ procession of male dancers dress up to rally other troops. It’s a film with a very thoughtful set-up, targeting the hidden hypocrisy of male prisons while threatening to expose their inherent homosocial appeal. However, as a film about a belated romance between two men, it’s often left lacking in real soul and a palpable sense of connection between its characters.
In their isolated moments behind closed doors, Pierre and Francis rarely transcend their roles as individual characters. There’s little sense of actual dynamic between them (not to mention a distinct lack of spark), due in large part to Daunt’s reliance on dialogue and perfunctory exposition. In a moment of intimate choreography, Campani places his triangular face perfectly within Macchia’s concave sternum, as if Pierre’s heart was waiting for someone like Francis, but this potentially beautiful moment is made awkward and awkward by the fact that the two young actors have to work overtime just to make their characters seem to love each other.
As the film continues, Pierre’s questioning of his identity, as a military pawn, ends up conflicting with Francis’s true dedication to the cause, as an artist aiming to arouse patriotic sentiment. Separately, these stories are interesting, but a bit of the tension stems from the fact that the young lovers practically end up on opposite sides of war as a concept (not to mention the film’s lack of a critical approach to the historical intersection between queerness and militarism, which a fellow Cannes contestant shared). La Pola Negra captures much more spirit). Although there is an internal tension between entertainment and propaganda, the film’s political dimensions are surprisingly lackluster, a flaw that goes hand in hand with its main characters rarely having to fight against (or even really think about) the larger implications of anything but their own imaginations, even though they are always in danger.
Even when reality collapses on its heroes, coward It plays less like a film of prickly isolation (or the repositioning of queer identity within a broader, turbulent history), and more like an instructive contemporary document of wartime queer fashion, especially as the battlefield fades from the film’s scope. And yet, throughout, Macchia and Campagne remain eminently watchable, capturing fleeting moments of unexpected thought and action from behind the emotional walls of both Pierre and Francis – something that, unfortunately, Donet never quite gets to. Even at two hours, the film still needs real content.
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