King of Hearts · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the moment the town empties. The Germans have gone, the townspeople have fled, and Private Plumpick — a Scottish ornithologist who keeps the battalion's pigeons, sent to defuse a bomb he has no idea how to find — walks into streets where nothing moves. Senlis stands in for Marville: real medieval stone, real daylight, and not a soul. De Broca and his cameraman Pierre Lhomme let Plumpick discover the vacancy the way we do, one empty square at a time. This is where the film quietly changes genres. It was supposed to be a suspense picture — ticking device, deadline, a hero racing to save a town. Instead the hero arrives to find the situation has already dissolved out from under him.

Deleuze had a name for a space like this: the any-space-whatever (espace quelconque), a place drained of its function as a stage for action, so that it stops being a setting and becomes pure mood. The deserted town isn't where the plot happens; it's a held, affective emptiness that the plot can no longer organize. And notice what fills it. Not soldiers, not citizens, but the asylum patients, who stroll out through their unlocked gates and take up the abandoned costumes and titles of the vanished bourgeoisie — duke, bishop, general, courtesan. The staging turns the whole town into a theatre, and de Broca directs it as one: the brothel, the cathedral, the barbershop become stations in a continuous performance.

This is the film's real invention, and Deleuze gives it two precise names. First, the gest — a posture or attitude that exposes a social relation instead of arguing about it. When Pierre Brasseur or Jean-Claude Brialy puts on the duke's sash and plays the part straight, with dignity rather than caricature, the performance lays bare that the 'sane' world's roles were always costumes too. The satire never needs a speech; it lives entirely in bodies wearing borrowed authority as though it fit. The production's most important decision — play the lunatics tenderly, not as grotesques — is what lets the gest read as a purer sanity rather than a joke.

Second, fabulation: subjects caught in the act of legending themselves. The inmates don't merely mimic a lost order, they invent a living one, crowning the bewildered soldier their King of Hearts. Deleuze prized this because it's where cinema stops recording a people and starts conjuring one that doesn't yet exist. Which points to his flintiest political idea, the people are missing. The war outside is fought by masses who march mechanically toward mutual slaughter; the only community with any warmth is a court of the mad, a people that is by definition not a people. The film's ache is that the only sane society it can imagine has to be dreamed up by the certified insane.

What has happened to the action, meanwhile, is exactly what Deleuze called the crisis of the action-image. In a healthy action film a character perceives a situation and acts to transform it — situation, action, new situation, the sensory-motor circuit humming. Plumpick can't complete that circuit. He is a pigeon-keeper mistaken for a demolitions expert; his bewildered reactivity, which Alan Bates plays as perpetual astonishment, is the whole point. The structure is picaresque — Deleuze's voyage-balade, the trip or stroll that transforms nothing — a sequence of encounters that leads not to victory but to renunciation.

The renunciation is the film's boldest stroke. At the gates, the two returned armies annihilate each other in a tidy mutual massacre, and the inmates simply look on. Deleuze would call this the birth of the seer out of the agent: characters (and we) reduced to a pure optical situation, watching a horror no action can touch. The film gives its climax not to a deed but to a gaze. And then the last image — Plumpick presenting himself naked at the asylum gate, birdcage in hand, choosing readmission to the madhouse over the sane world. That tableau is the thesis rendered as a single picture, action fully transposed into figure: what Deleuze called the reflection-image, the moment a film stops acting its meaning and poses it.

The lineage is French to the bone. The anarchic institutionalized innocents who overturn adult reason by lyrical revolt come straight from Vigo's Zéro de conduite; the whole-town-as-operetta staging is the grammar of Clair's Le Million; the pacifism carried by human warmth instead of polemic is Renoir's La Grande Illusion; and the madmen playing society's parts straight is the theatricality of Les Enfants du Paradis. From the other side it's pure de Broca — the same Boulanger scripts and Delerue scores as That Man from Rio, and Delerue's lilting, waltzing melancholy, borrowed from the register he gave Truffaut's Jules et Jim, that sentimentalizes the inmates just enough to make their innocence affecting.

The film flopped in France and then became the Vietnam-era campus's favorite anti-war fable — which is its final Deleuzian twist. A picture about a people who don't exist finally found one: the audience that needed it. Watch it again for the empty town before the madness moves in. That silence is the whole argument.