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Lukas Dhont’s ‘Coward’ Renders Queer Desire Against the Machinery of War

Two performances of rare feeling carry this World War I drama that struggles to achieve real depth.

The trenches of World War I set the stage for queer yearning in Lukas Dhont’s Coward, the Cannes competition entry that—despite its numerous pitfalls—won both its lead actors the Prix d’interprétation masculine, or the award for Best Actor. The trophy was well-deserved, not only despite Dhont’s malformed drama, but perhaps even because of it, forcing standout stars Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne to conjure depth and subtext from the ether; movie magic comes in many forms.

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Macchia plays Belgian youth Pierre, a caricatured farmboy lunk whose broad sketching is made immediately effective by the actor’s touching naïveté. Practically lost on the front lines, the character’s forced grins are betrayed by his darting eyes, which always seem to be searching for something—either a way out of his country’s cruel wartime predicament, or some way to formulate the right questions about himself in the first place, and his position in a........

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