Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch King of Hearts
1966 · Philippe de Broca · King of Hearts on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the patients play their borrowed roles completely straight. (staging)
Brasseur, Brialy, and the rest wear the vanished bourgeoisie's costumes and titles with total dignity, never once played as caricature or joke.
Payoff: If their play looks fully real, whatever the sane world was doing with its roles starts to look like costume too. In the reading: the gest. Deleuze calls a posture that exposes a social relation instead of arguing it a gest, and playing madness straight is exactly that.
Watch the camera discover the town at Plumpick's pace. (camera)
It follows his bewildered point of view as he moves from empty streets into the populated pageantry, learning the town exactly as he does.
Payoff: You never know more than he does, so his confusion becomes yours too.
Notice the costumes' color against the plain gray stone. (light)
De Broca shoots on location in genuine medieval Senlis, so the soft, festive color of the inmates' pageantry plays out against real, unglamorized architecture.
Payoff: The fantasy never gets to hide inside a stylized set. It has to survive in a real town.
Listen for the score refusing to sound military. (sound)
Delerue's lilting, waltzing theme stays melancholy and gentle even in scenes tied to the war plot, never borrowing the martial idiom you'd expect.
Payoff: The score has already picked a side before a single character says a word.
Notice how little Plumpick actually does about the bomb. (structure)
He was sent to find and defuse a device, but the town's takeover by the patients keeps swallowing that mission whole, scene after scene.
Payoff: The suspense plot keeps dissolving into something the soldier has no idea how to act on.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch how straight the patients play their parts. Their sincerity is the film's whole argument.