Dir: Lukas Dhont | Belgium Drama 121′
Lukas Dhont’s follow-up to his recent outings Girl and Close is a First World romance about two Belgian soldiers staging theatrical revues behind the frontlines while the world tears itself apart.
Pierre (Emmanuel Macchia), a fragile young recruit desperate to confirm to masculine ideals of the army, falls under the spell of Francis (Valentin Campagne), a flamboyant morale officer who treats the battlefield like a cabaret in waiting. Together they cling to art, desire and performance as shells rain down around them. Pierre, the coward of the piece, wounds himself in order to escape the front but is sent back.
The Belgian filmmaker and his cinematographer Frank van den Eeden shoot the trenches like bruised oil paintings: smoke curling through blue dawn light, velvet shadows swallowing candlelit bunkers, soldiers posed in tableaux that seem halfway between battlefield photography and backstage melodrama. Every frame looks painstakingly composed, every uniform perfectly distressed, every close-up trembling with capital-C Cinema. You can practically hear the standing ovation before the credits roll. But for all its graceful visual allure, this is a tedious, boisterous affair and none of the army tunes are heartfelt or even memorable. They’re just noise.
For all its exquisite surfaces, Coward never convinces us that its central love affair exists beyond abstraction. Pierre and Francis are less characters than elegantly lit concepts: innocence and freedom, repression and release. Dhont keeps insisting on the emotional enormity of their connection without ever locating the tiny, specific details that make movie romance breathe. We understand what the film wants them to mean to each other; we rarely feel it ourselves.
The result is a curious kind of emptiness: a film intoxicated by longing that never quite generates desire. Even the lovers’ most intimate scenes feel arranged for maximum festival stills impact, all trembling eyelashes and soft-focus despair, but no pulse underneath. It’s gorgeous, mournful, impeccably tasteful — and strangely inert. You leave admiring the craftsmanship while wondering why your heart never once caught up.
CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | IN COMPETITION