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dir. Lukas Dhont
Walking into the premiere of Lukas Dhont’s Coward felt monumental. The poster had been following me around Cannes for a week before the screening; its image of a circle of young men rallying together carried a charge that was difficult to name. The promise of a Dhont film sets high expectations, but those of us who have become followers know that it also guarantees something rare: a genuine exploration of intimacy. And so, as I settled into Le Grand Lumière, I became part of the collective. Isn’t that the great promise of the cinema? We surrender our individuality and merge into one body, sharing the same experience, feeding off each other.
To be frank, the seats in the gods felt like coffins. But the moment Coward began, the body ceased to matter. The film follows Pierre, a young Belgian recruit on the front line during the first World War, who is played by Emmanuel Macchia in a staggering debut. He meets Francis, Valentin Campagne, who is luminous and restless. Francis belongs to the theatre troupe and is charged with the impossible task of keeping spirits high. What unfolds between them, against the brutal backdrop of the trenches, is intimate in the way that only fear can make people intimate. There is cruel irony at the heart of Coward: that the very proximity of death becomes a kind of liberation. When a man knows he may not survive the morning, the prohibitions of ordinary life lose their grip. Pierre and Francis fall in love on the front line because it offers them shelter that the world beyond the wire never could.
The most entrancing sequences in the film are the theatrical performances themselves. Dhont makes a sustained argument for the necessity of art: not as ornament or distraction, but as the very mechanism of survival. The seemingly frivolous act of theatre is rendered powerful enough to ready men for slaughter. We gain courage, the film insists, through collective art.
I felt the entire cinema hold its breath during the scene in which the theatre troupe visits a battalion at the front, Pierre now among their number alongside Francis. They perform in a circle, and something monumental is constructed before our eyes, not just on screen but in the room itself. I was entranced by the battle song, by their zeal and their desperation, by the terrible sincerity of it all. Francis and Pierre wave flags and rile the soldiers into a kind of ecstasy. It was such a powerful moment that I, too, felt ready for battle.
It vividly reminded me of the St Crispin’s Day speech. Coward participates in a long tradition of rallying speeches, from Henry V’s St Crispin’s Day speech to Eisenhower’s Order of the Day. Henry V is a play of systematic alternation, between the heroic and the comedic, between the grandeur and the fragility of human flesh. King Hal’s speech is his moment of becoming: he must shed the mischief of his youth and convince an outnumbered army of its own immortality. This speech has become a cultural marker for its euphoriant power of words and passion to move men beyond reason, beyond fear.
Coward operates in that same register. It does not glorify war with sweeping drone shots of a bombarded landscape, nor peddle the Achilles fantasy of dying in battle a hero. Instead, it swells with the intensity of the bonds forged when fear runs unchecked, bonds that the film ultimately frames as the only true form of heroism. That Dhont’s two leads, Macchia and Campagne, walked away from Cannes sharing the Best Actor prize; such an award feels not merely deserved but inevitable. They carry the whole frightening weight of war and forbidden love between them.
And yet, despite the seriousness of the film, we left the cinema euphoric. The hysteria of the theatre had taken hold of us.
dir. Clio Barnard
To capture the perspectives of five individuals in any art form is a feat in and of itself. But this film made the challenge feel consumable, never letting me feel overwhelmed by the shift between characters, always keeping me with them through their trials and their triumphs. For Barnard’s return to features after five years away, I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning came out punching. The opening scene filled me with such joy, and such a violent need to dance, that I genuinely considered it at 08:45 in the morning, hungover, a croissant clutched in one fist like a weapon. It was needed. Somehow, against all odds, this film woke me.
To say I came in blind would be an understatement. My friend, Nina, dragged me out of bed at the crack of dawn, ranting about a performance by Anthony Boyle that we simply had to see. But he was far from the only face to steal my heart that morning. Each actor: Boyle, Joe Cole, Jay Lycurgo, Daryl McCormack and Lola Petticrew, rocked me to my core through the sheer intensity of their abilities. Nothing felt performed; everything felt confessed. It was raw and true, the kind of acting that makes you forget you are sitting in a cinema at all, that there is a row of strangers in the dark beside you. I cried and laughed and danced with every single one of them.
I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning is an expressive commentary on the bind young adults find themselves in when friendships stay but circumstances mutate. Lifestyles shift. Some marry, some travel, some hunt for meaning in everything that drifts past, and some actually “make it.” But the film keeps asking us what happiness is, and how one is meant to attain it. Is it love? A career? Money? A dog? What is happiness to you, and how far would you go to get it? What would it cost, and what would you fear the second it was finally in your hands? Would it ever be enough? Questions I thought when the lights came back up and my sunglasses went on.
Barnard lays the stages of grief bare and ripped apart, not as a tidy sequence but as the messy, non-linear ambush they really are. The message I carried out of the cinema with me was a simple one: the point of life is to dance; we owe it to the ones who no longer can.
I left obsessed. By the time I had wiped my face I was already googling Barnard’s previous work: The Arbor, The Selfish Giant, Ali & Ava, Dark River, a whole back catalogue to devour and a brand new obsession to be insufferable about at dinner parties for years to come.
So I sat there, after the kind of night most of these characters would have happily joined me in, completely wrecked and grateful. I cannot thank Barnard enough for crafting something this alive. Best believe, I’d do the croissant-clutching, hungover, weeping 08:45 AM all over again.
We will open for submissions in the fall.
