“In Lukas Dhont’s war film, love is the most radical act”

Before there was a screenplay, there were photographs. Black-and-white images, preserved in the institutional silence of a war archive, of young men in improvised dresses — not costumes so much as acts of collective imagination, assembled from whatever ingenuity and necessity could provide, worn in the brief intervals between one kind of violence and the next. Lukas Dhont looked at these images and understood, with the instinct that separates artists from archivists, that they were not marginals. They were the center. Coward, his third feature after Queer Palm and Un Certain Regard winner Girl and Grand Jury recipient Close, radiates outward from that center with the controlled force of a film that knows precisely what it wants to say and has found, at last, the exact form in which to say it. In Lukas Dhont’s war film, love is the most radical act.

The film opens on a number so large it briefly resists comprehension — the total count of young men mobilised across the world for the First World War — and then immediately refuses the abstraction that such a number invites. Dhont is not interested in the war as geopolitical event or historical lesson. He is interested in the individual corps, its specific weight and warmth, its capacity for desire and dread and the stubborn, irrational insistence on joy that no amount of institutional violence has ever fully succeeded in extinguishing. The number is an invocation, not a statistic. It is Dhont’s way of saying: each one of these was a person. Here are two of them.

Pierre and Francis, the film’s young conscripts, are played by Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne with a complementary physicality so precisely calibrated it feels less cast than discovered. Macchia — found, in one of those acts of street-casting intuition that Dhont has made central to his practice, not in a drama school or an agency but in an agricultural courtyard — carries Pierre’s interiority in his body rather than his face: in the reluctant gravity of his gait, the way his hands still themselves when he is afraid, the almost imperceptible loosening of his entire frame when Francis performs. Campagne is his structural inverse — kinetic, centrifugal, constitutionally incapable of self-concealment. Together they generate a magnetism so palpable, so sensuously charged, that their love story becomes not merely believable but inevitable — the kind of screen chemistry that makes the viewer feel the pull of attraction in their own body, not merely observe it in someone else’s.

What makes this énamoration so powerful — so rare, in fact, in contemporary cinema’s frequent timidity around male desire — is that Dhont does not flinch from it. He depicts masculine longing with full sensuousness, without euphemism, without the narrative alibi of tragedy that so often licenses queer desire on screen by pre-emptively punishing it. The process by which these two men fall into each other — the stolen regard, the calibrated proximity, the moment when looking becomes wanting and wanting becomes, with the force of something long suppressed, needing — is rendered with an intimacy and an explicitness that feel genuinely courageous. That this courageous depiction rests entirely on the extraordinary performances of its two leads is the film’s deepest structural achievement: Macchia and Campagne do not illustrate desire. They incarnate it, in every hesitation, every held breath, every instant in which the body says what the voice cannot.

It is here that Coward enters into quiet, luminous dialogue with Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse — that great phenomenology of amorous experience, in which Barthes wrote that “the lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.” Pierre is, from first frame to last, a figure of waiting: waiting for permission, for safety, for the world to become hospitable enough to receive what he feels. The trenches, paradoxically, become the site where that waiting is finally, briefly, interrupted — where the pressure of mortality collapses the distance that peacetime propriety would have maintained indefinitely. Dhont understands, as Barthes did, that waiting is not passivity but its own form of violent interior experience, and that the moment it ends — the moment the attente gives way to the acte — carries the accumulated weight of everything that was withheld. When Pierre finally moves toward Francis, the viewer feels not just the release of dramatic tension but the discharge of something much older and more intimate: the universal, terrible relief of the self that has waited too long to be known.

The chemistry between them is registered almost entirely through Frank van den Eeden’s cadrage, through the distance or proximity the camera allows itself in relation to each body, through the accumulating eloquence of the regard before it becomes, at last and with devastating simplicity, touch. Van den Eeden’s mise en lumière builds two distinct diegetic worlds within the same film. The battlefield sequences exist in cold, unsparing daylight — the world of obligation, exposure, and death. The performance spaces, where Francis’s theatrical ambitions grow from communal singalong to elaborately conceptual drag spectacle, are rendered in soft pastels, a chromatic suspension of the ordinary, a world apart where different laws of visibility and selfhood temporarily apply. This bifurcation is not merely aesthetic. It is the film’s central argument made sensory: that art constitutes a zone of improbable freedom, a hors-champ of sanctioned reality in which the self that daily life forbids can briefly, precariously, exist.

The title arrives late and lands with the quiet force of something that has been inevitable from the first frame. Dhont has spoken of heroism’s historical demand for total self-repression — the idea that in 1914, to feel was already to fail, that fear and longing and tenderness were liabilities to be cauterized rather than acknowledged. Coward reads this demand as a form of intimate violence, and it reads Pierre’s eventual refusal of it — his choice, with love now inhabiting him, to want to survive — not as moral failure but as the first authentically free act of a man who has spent his entire existence performing a subjectivity imposed from outside. The lâcheté of the title is, in Dhont’s devastating reframing, the beginning of a self. The coward is the one who, against everything, dares to feel.

Underneath all of this runs a current of historical tenderness that the film neither announces nor explains but simply embodies — sourced in the kind of archival detail that moves not because it is dramatic but because it is true: the documented reality that men, in the most extreme conditions imaginable, found ways to give each other what they needed, to create beauty and warmth and the semblance of intimacy in the interstices of catastrophe. Dhont films on the actual terrain where this history unfolded, and you feel it’s ethical pressure in every image — not as solemnity but as a refusal to aestheticize what must not be aestheticized, held in tension with an equal refusal to deny the joy that persisted alongside the horror. That double refusal is where Coward lives, in the entre-deux, and it is the source of its considerable moral and emotional authority.

This is, Dhont has insisted, a film for now — a counter-image to the relentless contemporary spectacle of masculine destruction, an argument made in light and bodies and the associative logic of the montage that tenderness is not weakness, that fear honestly expressed is more courageous than violence stoically performed, that two young men finding each other in the dark constitutes, against all the evidence of the world that surrounds them, an act of radical affirmation. In a Cannes Competition that has announced itself as perhaps the most bracingly, defiantly queer in living memory — queerness not as theme but as sensibility, as formal principle, as the organizing intelligence behind some of the festival’s most urgent work — Coward stands as the most devastating and most moving entry of all: the one that earns its emotions most honestly, that asks the most of its audience and gives the most in return. Whether Park Chan-wook’s jury will feel the same when the palmarès is read on Saturday remains, as always, the festival’s great suspended question. But few films in this Competition have made the case for their own necessity with such quiet, unassailable force.

The fog of war, in Dhont’s rendering, is also the fog in which certain lives have always been required to move — half-seen, half-acknowledged, present without being admitted. Coward admits them. Fully, warmly, without apology. That is enough. That, finally, is everything.