Lukas Dhont knows that, as far as titles go, Coward sounds a bit loaded. But the Belgian filmmaker, whose previous feature Close won the Grand Prix at Cannes and was nominated for the international 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 (and were, certainly, exceedingly rare in film). 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.…