The trenches of World War I set the scene for strange desires Lukas DhontS ‘ cowardlythe Cannes competition entry that – despite its many pitfalls – gave both leads the Male Performance Award, or Best Actor award. The trophy was deserved, not only despite Dhonti’s botched play, but perhaps because of it, forcing outstanding stars Emmanuel Macchia AND Valentine Village to conjure depth and subtext from the ether; Movie magic comes in many forms.
Macchia plays the Belgian boy Pierre, a cartoonish farmer whose broad outline is made immediately effective by the actor’s touching naivety. Practically lost on the front lines, the character’s forced smiles are betrayed by his impetuous eyes, which always seem to be searching for something – either a way out of his country’s cruel state of war, or a way to formulate the right questions about himself in the first place, and his position in a hypermasculine, militaristic hierarchy.
Pierre first sets eyes on the thin and loud Francis (Campaign) when the latter – belly bulging to look pregnant – playfully rushes into the makeshift men’s mess hall in order to pantomime childbirth as the eagle spreads across the lunch table. A scene full of boyish energy, part joke, part party, as one of their friends has just become a father. However, Dhonti’s camera can’t help but often fall on Pierre’s inquisitive disposition. The ex-farmer seems to like the quaint facade and camp (not to mention Francis’s unfettered faith in the performance of femininity), though he’s far from understanding why.
This sets the stage for Pierre to be lured away from the mud, guns, blood and bombs and towards Francis’ unit: a group of young men tasked with entertaining their conscripted countrymen across the European front to boost their morale. In scenes of wartime chaos, Dhont and the cinematographer Frank van den Eeden create a grim intensity in the dead of night, a palpable danger from an unseen enemy, matched only by what happens when young soldiers are too scared or damaged to follow their orders. They are labeled as deserters and executed by their superiors, further strengthening the walls placed around Pierre if he considers leaving.
As a straight-up war movie, cowardly mainly works. To match the bombast of the battlefield, he summons a frenzied energy whenever Francis’s cavalcade of male dancers don dresses to rally the rest of the troops. It’s a film of extremely thoughtful set-ups, targeting the subtle hypocrisies of male prisons while threatening to expose their inherent homosocial allure. However, as a film about the gradual romance of two men, it is often left wanting for a real soul and a tangible 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 the actual dynamic between them (not to mention, a distinct lack of spark), largely due to Dhonti’s reliance on dialogue and rote delivery. In an intimately choreographed moment, Campagne places his triangular face perfectly inside Macchia’s concave sternum, as if Pierre’s heart had been 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 them look like their characters.
As the film progresses, Pierre’s questioning of his identity as a militaristic pawn ends up contradicting Francis’ true commitment to the cause, as an entertainer meant to stir up patriotic sentiments. On their own, these make for intriguing stories, but little tension emanates from the young lovers practically ending up on opposite sides of war as a concept (to say nothing of the film’s lackluster critical approach to the historical intersection of queerness and militarism. Entry to the Cannes competition Black Ball catch much more with spirit). Despite establishing an internal tension between entertainment and propaganda, the film’s political dimensions are surprisingly thin, a flaw that goes hand in hand with its main characters rarely having to struggle against (or even really consider) the larger implications of anything but their own fantasy, though they’re always at risk.
Even when reality falls on its protagonists, cowardly plays less like a film with sharp closure (or re-positioning of queer identity within a larger, troubled story), and more like a prescient contemporary document of queer wartime cosplay, especially when the battlefield fades from the film’s scope. Throughout, though, Macchia and Campagne remain remarkably perceptive, capturing fleeting moments of unpredictable thought and action from behind Pierre and Francis’ respective emotional walls—which Dhont, unfortunately, never quite scales. Even at two long hours, it remains in need of real substance.
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