With 'Coward,' Lukas Dhont turns World War I inside out — finding in its trenches a hidden world of crossdressing, queer romance and a tenderness that history has been too afraid to talk about.
feature Oscar, was drawn to the name for exactly that reason: “It’s a word that has a lot of charge, it’s a word that carries a lot of judgment,” he says on a short break from the final stages of postproduction of his new movie.
“Many men in the past have been sent to their deaths out of fear of being called a ‘coward. ’” Before settling on that word, Dhont had been immersing himself in stories and images of World War I that ran counter to popular imagination . He learned of male soldiers performing theater pieces on the front lines, cross-dressing and earnestly playing the roles of wives and mothers.
He read about closeted queer people finding rare, lasting romantic connections with each other. And within his own country’s history, particularly, Dhont discovered the fates that met would-be deserters who were caught — brutal sentences often leading to death. Each of these realities brushed up sharply against typical notions of “patriarchal masculinity,” as Dhont terms it, and together offered a grand opportunity for subversion.
— pushing himself further in his explorations of sexuality and connection, while working on a far larger scale. The war film is also his sweetest, most tender effort to date, surprising given his penchant for emotionally pulverizing twists and turns.
But Dhont likes to play with expectations.follows Pierre , a young Belgian soldier struggling to go on, and his romance with a flamboyant peer named Francis , who stages impromptu, gender-bending dances and theatrical performances alongside others in the army.
“The camera has been so often focused on battles or the battlefield, and I saw an opportunity within the genre to point the camera to something else, which is these men who are conditioned to fight but who then, while waiting, actually create something together and are there for each other intimately,” Dhont says. “When I read these journals, for example, the testimony of a soldier who described one of his comrades performing as their mother and giving them a kiss goodnight — I was so deeply moved by this form of masculinity, which is so much about embracing emotion.
” The spark for Dhont came with encountering a simple black-and-white photo of a soldier cross-dressing just behind enemy lines. The director then traveled to galleries and historical centers like London’s Imperial War Museum to learn more about this lesser-known tradition. The walls were lined with images of tanks, descriptions of battles won and lost, odes to fallen heroes. He had to dive deeper.
“We live in a society that pushes certain images of force and violence to the front and pushes away these images of softness,” he says. This went for testimonies from queer soldiers, too: “There was this strange, weird contradiction for me: This space of violence, for some queer men, was also a place of liberation.
” Dhont combines these two core ideas in the story of Pierre and Francis, which plays out in whispers, glances — as well as, occasionally, very public expressions of love that are disguised in the costumed confines of fiction, whenever they perform together.
“There is this relationship at the core of the film, which can’t be made public, but that needs to happen in public,” Dhont says. “It’s something that completely develops in front of the eyes of others. ” More generally, this reflects Dhont’s approach to the war genre. There are harrowing glimpses of life on the battlefield, of the pervasive stench of death that Pierre, Francis et al. contend with each day.
But this remains the furthest thing from an action film. The clearest link betweenis their rigorous sense of perspective. Down to the volatile sound design and pangs of romantic yearning, to say nothing of the first-person cinematography lensed by Dhont regular Frank van den Eeden, this movie follows Pierre’s every move from the inside out.
“It was really important for us to create an experience for an audience member that is immersive, that is intimate,” Dhont says. “I wanted you to be a companion to one character in this film and follow the world through his eyes. ”The period setting demands a degree of authenticity that Dhont was eager to execute. The camp where most of the film is set, for instance, was at the exact site of a real-life World War I setup.
“I drive through these West Flemish fields nearly every week because my partner is from that place — the cemeteries with all these boys are, in a way, a part of our lives,” Dhont says. “We see them, we drive on the land where all these men fought and died. So to then be there with 150 young men in that costume, singing and dancing, in itself was an extraordinary experience. It felt like we were traveling through time.
” Most of the songs that Francis leads the group through were actual tunes performed during the war. Dhont and his team dug them up through their archival research; both comically and dramatically, they earnestly explored maternal love, romantic connection, collective bonding and more. Theteam then composed a few original pieces that are sprinkled through the movie, inspired by the music of the era that surrounds them.will prove no different in that regard.
Amid the blossoming love between Pierre and Francis, one soldier grapples with a decision that illuminates the movie’s choice of title.
“I thought it was really interesting to talk about those who want to escape violence and what the world has done to them,” Dhont says. “In the past, people have been marginalized for the decision to not want to fight. ” Those who successfully escaped in the Belgian army, at least, had to vanish without a trace.
“How did they lead their lives afterwards if they had to flee and couldn’t return to the place that they come from? ” Dhont asks.
“What does it mean to be a hero or a coward? ” Dhont recalls a recent TV program in Belgium that saw noted politicians interacting with students about escalating conflicts around the world. One young man expressed fear that their country would be soon drawn into a war — and wondered whether a draft could follow.
“This politician returned the question and said, ‘Well, who wouldn’t fight if Belgium was under attack? ’ All the boys in that space, they raised their hands ,” Dhont recalls.
“This boy who we could clearly feel had a fear of war, even he felt obliged to say ‘yes’ as well. There was this pressure. It has been accepted through time that men give their lives for a bigger purpose, and I wanted to talk about those men who did that — but also to give space to those who try to escape from that circle.
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