Pierre (Emmanuel Macchia) is our focal point and sensitive hero. He falls hesitantly in love with Francis (Valentin Campagne), a halting romance that’s portrayed carefully by the two actors, as if to suggest that the two young men, driven by impulse and circumstance, don’t quite fully comprehend what’s happening to them in their shared process of falling for one another. This seems like a realistic move to me. Homosexual though they might be, many soldiers worldwide found themselves in such situations throughout the 20th century, particularly in WWI and WWII, when the wars took them away from often rural homescapes and towards their close encounters with each others in cities and ports all around the world. Some gay male historians have even posited that WWII set the very notion of gay male identity into motion in that way, hence the popular notion of gay and bisexual (and straight and curious) sailors who’d come ashore and gather in what came to be among the first gay bars and clubs in many locations globally.
Our hope for everything to work out fine for Pierre and Francis, despite the mass deaths and daily upheavals that surround them as soldiers in wartime, is mainly what drives the film and maintains the audience’s interest. They share a folded note with a simple line-drawing of a mountain where they plan to meet and shack up together in seclusion (either after the war has ended or after they both go AWOL), in a clear-eyed nod to Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain. That encompassing focus on the relationship between Pierre and Francis in Coward highlights the deep strengths of both actors’ performances, while also drawing attention to some slight awkwardness in the characterizations at time, as though the actors (who might as well have previously been models) aren’t always totally certain how to telegraph certain emotional responses. I felt that same awkwardness a bit in Lukas Dhont’s previous film, Close, though the youth of the two actors in that film as young boys may have added more obviously to that very uncertainty. Perhaps it’s a very minor directorial glitch, or perhaps it lies wholly on the acting side. I even wonder if there’s something about masculinity and gay life in Belgian culture that I’m just unfamiliar with, which I’m reading as awkwardness on occasion? A discomfort with being gay in earlier historical periods is what gets underscored, even if that potentially stereotypical stance is presented with plenty of self-awareness and mostly with artistic prowess, both in Coward and in Close.
What sets Lukas Dhont’s films apart is how they very deliberate approach themes of masculinity (and broken masculinity) with a true sense of revelatory care. Male bodies are filmed with a tenderness and aesthetic investment in his movies, which very few of his contemporaries can achieve. Coward most brought to mind Claire Denis’ masterpiece Beau Travail, for instance, a comparison which makes it clear that Lukas Dhont is in it for the seriousness of the cinematic and directorial game, and at just age 35 now, he’s also clearly in it for the long haul.
Saturday, October 24, 2026
Club Kid (dir. Jordan Firstman, 2026)
The first thing that came to mind was a former friend who had her son via IVF. She said of the experience that up to that point in her life, it was as if she’d been behind a pane of glass, watching the world pass by, separated from her. And then her little boy came along, “and he walked me through the glass.” I’m sorry, but I really don’t like the idea of a human child being the cause of someone’s redemption or their spiritual awakening or whatever. The self-involved narcissism that the person (Peter Green in the instance of Club Kid) had to overcome is simply replaced with another even worse form of narcissism: your son becomes merely the vehicle for your newfound self-understanding, and that drives the entire concept of the movie. This is why narcissists should always just have pets, not kids.
Yes, some elements of queer community enter into the film, yet they seemed more like colorful sprinkles or ice-cream toppings to me: intradiegetically unrealistic, and lingering not just on the fringes of the narrative (as do those mini-performances, sweet though they may be), but pretty much entirely outside of it. I’d read in a couple of early reviews about the film’s final half-hour or so, so I didn’t need to stay for that part. No need for drama about Arlo’s immigration status, certainly no need for any courtroom scene nor its requisite heartfelt speech. I walked away caring only about the chemistry between Jordan Firstman and Reggie Absolom on screen, which is essentially the magic of casting, with some scattered bits of acting (mostly embodied in gazes and attitudes).
Any movie that tosses in a few quick references to Björk and Cocteau Twins has to be cool, right? Especially if an adorable little 10-year-old British kid is making them? Not necessarily. They have to come from somewhere that’s grounded in the scenes themselves and not tiny flashes of detail that are mostly just accessories. And the flimsiness of being just an accessory, cinematically, is what sank my hopes for this movie. I wanted to see it succeed, not just as a commercial product, but as an artful and worthwhile one. In the back row near my seat were some of the creative team, excited to see the gay audience at Newfest watch and embrace the film, a gay New York movie screened on a Friday night in Chelsea, the gay heart of New York City. I get it. Though I think there’s an insularity to all of that which kind of precludes the sense of objectivity required to make an authentically good movie. Please don’t let this one be nominated for any screenplay awards. Or acting awards. Whatever its successes might be, they’re more external than internal. Give it awards for casting or marketing. (Sorry not sorry, Jordan.)
The one arresting moment in the narrative for me was when Arlo tells Peter point-blank that his mother (who’d become the hazy memory butt-of-a-joke to Peter and his friends over the preceding decade) died by suicide. It’s invoked so fleetingly, however, that it’s almost as if the movie knows that it’s unable to look seriousness more directly in the eye because it’s trying to evoke a world where real tragedies don’t actually exist. They’re mentioned and hinted at, but they might as well be fantasy, just like the rest of the movie is. So I think that’s the tragic quality that taints the film for me, knowing that it could have aspired to be more than what it is, if only it had taken the time and hard-nosed attention required to figure that out in more intricate and rewarding ways.
Sunday, October 4, 2026
The Music of Duncan Sheik
The key song in Duncan Sheik’s oeuvre, and the first on his two-disc pop career retrospective, Brighter/Later, is “That Says It All,” a tribute to his (male) musical heroes that tracks his praise for them while also admitting how he feels he might pale in comparison to them, lyrically. Jagger, Dylan, and Lennon get kudos in the first verse, then the second verse turns darker through the invocation of Jimi Hendrix, Brian Wilson, and Nick Drake, all of whom struggled with addiction and in two cases died quite young from drug overdoses, and in Nick Drake’s case, an overdose of an antidepressant, no less. I’d heard Duncan perform a solo concert of only Nick Drake covers, and we admired many of the same artists, so when I first met him back in January of 2007 at an album signing for his game-changing musical Spring Awakening, I told him that he had great taste in cover songs. He rolled his eyes at me and kind of sighed. “Yeah, that will probably be the next album project,” and it was. His covers of his favorite 1980s New Wave classics like The Blue Nile’s “Stay” and The Psychedelic Furs’ “The Ghost in You” are some of the most quietly powerful songs that he recorded, sung in his distinctively dressed-down tones, beyond somber. And so I think his roll of the eyes at me when I praised his taste in covers was not so much a dismissive insult but rather a quick visual admission that I got it. We are what we like.
But I also hadn’t stood in front of him praising his own compositions, just after he’d made the big decision to pivot from pop music to theatre, and theatre was largely where he stayed for the remainder of his career. I have all of his studio albums but little interest in them after his fourth album, 2002’s Daylight, which I think was probably his pop peak. His eponymous debut in 1996 had a couple of hits, which led to songs on rom-com soundtracks, and then 1998’s Humming showed him deepening his palate as he began to pursue Buddhism (quite seriously, not as a hobby). “Barely Breathing” and “She Runs Away” from his debut album were inward-looking for mainstream pop, but that debut also includes contemplative numbers like “November” and “The End of Outside,” conceived in a style that morphed in complex ways (again, for pop music, and even for occasionally orchestral pop music) by the time he arrived at Humming. On “In Between,” the opening track of that album, he sings, “I feel a little undefined” and “I’m in between, no use wondering what I mean,” in contrast to “the endless bright parade” of the apparent certainty of active life surrounding him. The song ends as an intimate apology for not being clearer-cut to the people closest to him.
Sheik’s third album, 2001’s Phantom Moon, featured lyrics by Steven Sater, a kind of preview to their work together on Spring Awakening and other musicals. I remember going over for dinner at the apartment of a guy I was dating, and I had the CD of Phantom Moon in my backpack, so we listened to it while we ate. “Who listens to music like this?” was his response. Needless to say, that was our last date, and the introspective, galaxy-spanning reach of Phantom Moon sort of defined where Duncan Sheik’s music would go from there. “Requiescat,” the album’s penultimate track, could have been written as a song to be played at Sheik’s own funeral, and Steven Sater quoted his own lyrics from the song at the beginning of a tribute piece that he wrote for Duncan after Duncan’s death. Death, as we know all too well, is nothing new, even if it always feels somehow so unfamiliar.
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