{"id":597045,"date":"2026-05-21T23:39:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-21T23:39:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/597045\/"},"modified":"2026-05-21T23:39:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-21T23:39:10","slug":"coward-review-queer-art-complements-war-in-subversive-military-drama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/597045\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Coward’ Review: Queer Art Complements War in Subversive Military Drama"},"content":{"rendered":"

The young leads of \u201cCoward\u201d have two of the most Belgian faces ever put onscreen \u2014 catch them in Cancun or Calcutta, and you\u2019d clock their origins in an instant. That\u2019s not an idle thought, mind you, for Lukas Dhont has made an almost elementally straightforward war drama built around queer love and desire. Premiering at Cannes, spoken in French and Flemish, and all but certain to be Belgium\u2019s Oscar submission, this heritage film waves its flag without apology.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The filmmaker behind \u201cGirl\u201d and \u201cClose\u201d<\/a> isn\u2019t trying to \u201cqueer\u201d history \u2014 how could he, when same-sex love on and off the battlefield has been so intrinsic to wartime that the very subject is a major plot point in \u201cThe Iliad?\u201d Instead, Dhont offers a corrective to a much more recent attempt to erase what was already there, making his case with force, pageantry and outsized patriotic zeal. All the same, the film is rather subversive, moving away from trench-based misery to reimagine the front as a place of great freedom and romantic possibility.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We follow young conscripts Pierre (Emmanuel Macchia) and Francis (Valentin Campagne) as they arm themselves with art \u2014 putting on performances to boost morale, fighting the war on their own terms. An opening title explains the Belgian policy of rotating battalions: those on the frontlines one day would fall back the next to recuperate and rebuild, returning to the fight with diminished ranks. <\/p>\n

From there, Dhont builds a world ever-so-adjacent to the slaughterhouse, where the artistically inclined could bloom.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Chief among them is Francis \u2014 a slight tailor\u2019s son who, born a few decades later, would almost certainly have become a cabaret performer or a Cannes-acclaimed director; in other words, John Cameron Mitchell. But we can\u2019t pick our time, and luckily for this gifted actor, director and drag artist, the war has handed him the perfect stage to deploy his talents, and find love.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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His partner isn\u2019t so fortunate: Pierre arrives with a fuller build, the kind that makes a body far more likely to be mangled when sent over the line. \u201cCoward\u201d takes its time, sketching out an ironic utopia where gender performers receive the kind of adulation unavailable in button-down civilian life \u2014 especially from a macho military corps for whom homophobia is second nature. That prejudice doesn\u2019t fall away when everyone\u2019s cramped together in close quarters, so for a while our two leads are forced into a very chaste flirtation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Dhont shot in academy ratio and frames shot after shot around eye-lines: for the first hour, we follow Pierre and Francis as they appraise one another, stealing glances that grow ever bolder. A body-strewn trip up the ladder returns Pierre emboldened to finally act \u2014 with Eros never far from Thanatos, as \u201cCoward\u201d tracks teenage sex and death at a very different camp.\u00a0<\/p>\n

From the first scene, Dhont leans on period songs and military chants, to the point where the film could qualify as a musical, given its reliance on a cappella numbers and war hymns. That dovetails with his unambiguous perspective on Francis as the greatest of true believers, an \u201ceach according to his ability\u201d hardliner determined to support the effort by any means available. Betrayed by his body, Pierre becomes the titular coward once he decides \u2014 understandably \u2014 that with love in his life he\u2019d rather not die. But the larger narrative never quite gets under his skin as intuitively as it does his partner\u2019s.<\/p>\n

\u00a0And that\u2019s pretty much it for a film closer in nature to a scrapbook than a novel. It plays as an oral, musical history, rich in period research and detail, laying out its narrative and thematic concerns early and never really moving beyond them. At some point, dreaming up his next revue, Francis says, \u201cIf they want patriotism, then we\u2019ll give them patriotism\u201d \u2014 without cynicism, and neither from the filmmaker.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Looking back a century, this very 2026 film is a clear product of its moment and its growing rightward shift. \u201cCoward\u201d doesn\u2019t frame the artist \u2014 or the queer perspective, though here the two are intrinsically linked \u2014 as a counterweight to militarism, but as a complement, arguing for inclusion on rah-rah terms. That\u2019s less a critique than an appraisal, and a distinction that speaks to the present as much as the past.<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\""Coward"\t\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The young leads of \u201cCoward\u201d have two of the most Belgian faces ever put onscreen \u2014 catch them…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":597046,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[160823,41891,96,204034,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-597045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-cannes","tag-cannes-film-festival","tag-entertainment","tag-lukas-dhont","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=597045"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597045\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/597046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=597045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=597045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=597045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}