Cannes 2026: Coward: Love in the Trenches (review)

Despite imperfections, the new Lukas Dhont, a queer romance at the heart of the butchery of the First World War, seduces with its beauty and its two magnificent performers

A metronome regularity. Eight years after his first feature Girl, crowned with the Caméra d’Or and four years after his second, Closeawarded the Grand Jury Prize, Belgian Lukas Dhont returns to the Croisette with a feature film, still driven by queer themes but confronting period film for the first time. Coward features a young Belgian sent to the front during the 1914-18 war where, responsible for recovering the wounded and corpses in the rare moments of calm, the brutal reality of the battlefield hits him in the face. Without anticipating that at the heart of this permanent chaos which creates in him a growing fear, he will have an encounter which will change his life: a young man who organizes, directs and performs cabaret shows where he disguises himself as a woman to maintain the morale of the soldiers and offer them an enchanted interlude of a few minutes.

Coward really takes off from the first lights of this love at first sight which sets them ablaze. Dhont films with as much incandescence the eyes that light up as the bodies that intermingle. And this while telling how this desire to put art at the heart of war to relieve souls, elevate them or train them elsewhere, can be seen as crass cowardice. A utopia which resonates with the utopia of living a love story in the heart of the trenches which a priori is equally condemned. On this double ground, Dhont’s direction would have benefited from being more suggestive when it often emphasizes what is so well whispered, or what we could also criticize (with an incomparable budget and a star like Penelope Cruz in the equation) in The black bola also presented yesterday. A choice of programming, moreover, a strange one and undoubtedly somewhat penalizing for the two films.

But once these reservations are made, Lukas Dhont still impresses here with his ability to bring out new faces (Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne, sensational heroes of this queer romance) and to sublimate them in images with the lighting of Frank van den Eeden who makes each shot a Flemish painting. This beauty, which is anything but gratuitous, but which speaks to all the power of art, even when we despise it or assimilate it to something hidden, keeps the film well above the waterline.

By Lukas Dhont. With Emmanuel Macchia, Valentin Campagne, Jonas Wertz… Duration: 2 hours