The trenches of World War I set the scene for such a longing for Lukas Dhont A cowardthe Cannes competition—despite its many pitfalls—won both of its leading actors the Prix d’interpretation masculine, or Best Actor award. The award was well-deserved, not only despite Dhont’s negative drama, but perhaps even because of it, forcing the main stars Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne to combine depth and subtexts from the ether; The magic of film comes in many forms.
Macchia plays the young Belgian Pierre, a caricatured farmboy lunk whose broad sketch is quickly made effective by the actor’s touching naïveté. Almost lost in the front lines, the forced laughter of the character is betrayed by his running eyes, which always seem to be looking for something—either a way out of the critical situation of the war in his country, or some way to establish the right questions about him from the beginning, and his position in the place of powerful, military rule.
Pierre first notices the thin, boisterous Francis (Campagne) when the latter—her belly full to appear pregnant—is playfully rushed into the men’s makeshift dining hall to give birth, while spreading eagle on the lunch table. A scene filled with the same energy, it’s part celebration, part celebration, as one of their comrades has just become a father. However, Dhont’s camera can’t help but fall for Pierre’s curious nature. The former farm laborer seems to love the facade and bawdy camp (not to mention Francis’ undying confidence in feminism), though he’s a long way from exploring why.
This sets the stage for Pierre to be pulled out of the mud, guns, blood and bombs, and into Francis’ wing: a group of young men charged with cheering up his countrymen recruited from across Europe to bolster their morale. In scenes of wartime chaos, Dhont and cinematographer Frank van den Eeden do the worst of the night, a visible danger from an invisible enemy, matched only by what happens to the young soldiers who are too scared or injured to do what he orders. They were called rebels and killed by their superiors, fortifying the walls placed around Pierre should he think of leaving.
As a straight war film, A coward it works a lot. Likening a battlefield bomb, it summons great energy whenever Francis’s cavalcade of male step dancers wears uniforms to rally other soldiers. It’s a film with a well-thought-out plot, targeting the subtle hypocrisy of male prisons while threatening to reveal their natural attraction. However, as a film about two men slowly falling in love, it is often left wanting for a real soul, and a tangible sense of connection between its characters.
In their moments alone behind closed doors, Pierre and Francis rarely outgrow their roles as individual characters. There’s little sense of real dynamic between them (not to mention a noticeable lack of spark), which owes a lot to Dhont’s reliance on dialogue and its rewarding delivery. In a moment of intense filming, Campagne puts his triangular face perfectly inside the butt of Macchia, as if Pierre’s heart is waiting for someone like Francis, but this potentially beautiful moment is made so awkward and strange that the two young actors have to work overtime to make it seem that their characters are the same.
As the film progresses, Pierre’s questioning of who he is, as a soldier, ends up clashing with Francis’ true dedication to this cause, as an entertainer who aims to evoke patriotic feelings. Separately, these make interesting stories, but the slight tension caused by the young lovers ends up turning to different sides of the war as a concept (to say nothing of how the film lacks a serious approach to the historical collaboration of crime and the military, which entered the Cannes competition. La Bola Negra takes it too seriously). Despite everything but establishing the internal tension between entertainment and propaganda, the political dimensions of the film are surprisingly blurred, the fault with which its main characters rarely fight (or really consider) the larger implications of anything other than their fiction, although they are always in danger.
Even if the truth comes and collides with its characters, A coward it plays less as a film about the closure of thorns (or about rediscovering one’s identity amid a wider, more chaotic history), and more as a defining document of the war’s wartime period, especially as the battlefield fades from the film’s view. And yet, all the while, Macchia and Campagne remain brilliantly observant, capturing fleeting moments of unexpected thought and action behind Pierre and Francis’ emotional walls — unfortunately Dhont never has. Even at two hours long, it’s left wanting for the real thing.
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