Soldiers in love in the trenches of the First World War

Special envoy to the Cannes Film FestivalUndoubtedly, one of the trends of this edition of the Cannes Film Festival is the prominence of LGBTI relationships, present in eight titles in the official competition. The film where the theme is most central has been, of course, La bola negra by the Javis, but also La vie d’une femme, with a superb Léa Drucker as a surgeon who falls in love for the first time with another woman, and, above all, Coward, where Lukas Dhont explores the trenches of the First World War as a space where dissident sexualities find cracks to exist.

As in the previous Girl and Close, Dhont films for a large part of the film with short takes and dim light a protagonist who is too sensitive for his own good. Here it is about a young and shy soldier, Henri, obviously shaken by the horrors of war. His refuge in this hell will be Francis, the leader of a special army unit preparing a variety show to entertain the troops. Dhont constructs the relationship between the two characters with the usual tools of melodrama about forbidden loves: following the faces closely and making the film a recital of clandestine glances and contained emotions.

Since we already know Brokeback mountainAlso in competition, German Valeska Grisebach sets in a small Bulgarian village near the Turkish border Archaeology of machismo

Also in competition, the German Valeska Grisebach sets in a small Bulgarian village near the Turkish border The dreamed adventure, in which an archaeologist working on an excavation reunites with an old friend involved in shady dealings and begins to pry into the network of dirty business and refugee trafficking run by a local mobster. Grisebach's direction is dry and anti-academic, as in the previous acclaimed Western, but it flows thanks to the calm charisma of its two protagonists, Syuleyman Letifov and, above all, Yana Radeva, who with her kind smile and discreet intelligence reveals herself as a magnificent thriller anti-heroine in a story that casts a dark shadow of sexism and oppression over Bulgarian society. The only drawback, the excessive duration of 167 minutes.

The competition has been closed by another thriller

, but a much more conventional one: Histoires de la nuit, by Léa Mysius, is a film from the horror subgenre known as home invasion that extends an archetypal situation (a woman's criminal past knocks on the door) with more or less correct results, but dramatically insufficient for the official competition of a Cannes Festival seen for sentencing, where a favorite for the Palme d'Or stands out above all: the extraordinary the extraordinary Soudain by Ryusuke Hamaguchi.