Gracefully finding love in the most hopeless of places — the desolate battlefields of the First World War — the Belgian director's third feature finds fertile new ground for his interest in imperiled queer identity and masculinity in crisis.
By Guy Lodge
Plus IconGuy Lodge
Film Critic
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Aline Boyen 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.
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