Even the manifold mudbaths and bloodbaths of the Western Front can’t do much to dirty up Lukas Dhont‘s exactingly exquisite filmmaking in “Coward,” the young Belgian director’s third feature, and his first to extend his recurring interest in challenged LGBTQ identity to a historical context. Observing the burgeoning romance between two Belgian soldiers — one outwardly masculine but harboring a secret, the other testing the norms of gender presentation in the aggressively patriarchal military — fighting the First World War, the new film is clearly of a piece with Dhont’s previous works, 2018’s controversial trans youth portrait “Girl” and 2022’s heartbroken childhood tragedy “Close,” in its intimate foregrounding of vulnerable queer characters and the quivery sensory specificity with which it portrays them.
But even as it doubles down on the virtues of those previous films — among them Dhont’s sure, sensitive hand with young actors, his knack for bringing internalized emotion rawly to the surface, his regular DP Frank van den Eeden’s immaculate command of light and framing — “Coward” feels pleasingly like a step forward, continuing all the aforementioned thematic investigations without resorting to the kind of battering-ram tragedy or shock tactics that made both “Girl” and “Close,” for all their accomplished qualities, quite divisive. It’s not because “Coward” is focused this time on (just about) adult characters that it feels like the filmmaker’s most mature film to date. Meanwhile, his warm, delicate handling of, for the first time, an out-and-out love story should entice a wider audience to this Cannes competition entry.
