King of Hearts · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

De Broca's evacuated Marville operates as a textbook any-space-whatever: once the German garrison has mined it and the townspeople have fled, the little French town is stripped of its habitual coordinates — civic, military, commercial — and becomes an indeterminate space open to reinvention. Into that void the asylum patients walk, and here mise-en-scène does the argument's work. Pierre Lhomme shoots in actual Senlis — genuine stone facades, real daylight — so that the lunatics' pageantry (bishop, barber, prostitute, general, all costumed to the hilt) plays against verifiably material streets rather than a theatrical set; the moral proposition, that these revelers are the town's sanest inhabitants, is made not through dialogue but through the camera's refusal to distinguish the real from the performed. That refusal is itself an act of genre subversion. De Broca inherited from the war-film cycle the plot machinery of ticking bombs and advancing armies, but where that genre presses toward purposeful action, King of Hearts keeps dissolving it: two armies obliterate each other off-screen while Plumpick wanders a garden party, and the mission's deadline arrives without consequence. The specific craft debt is to Vigo's Zéro de conduite, which established the French strategy of letting lyrical, dreamlike revolt — institutional innocents overturning the adult world — carry a pacifist argument that polemic could not. De Broca's innovation is to stage that revolt as a mirror: the lunatics perform society back at itself until society's violence becomes the real aberration.