Lost in the Shuffle: Doc is Part Modern Magic Show, Part Medieval Cold Case

By Chris Knight

Rating: B+

Does a standard deck of playing cards tell the story of a 15th-century regicide?

Canada’s Shawn Farquhar would like to think so, and he makes a pretty convincing case for it in Lost in the Shuffle, even if this quirky magic doc ends with a parade of experts noting that there’s actually no historical proof for his claim.

But why let reality get in the way of a good card trick?

As directed by fellow Canadian Jon Ornoy, Lost in the Shuffle is part history of playing cards, part modern magic show and part Medieval cold case, the last referring to the death in 1498 of France’s King Charles VIII. Did the 27-year-old actually expire after hitting his head on a door frame? Or was it… murder?

As he develops his regicidal thesis, Farquhar travels the world, touching down in several far-flung cities to learn at the feet of fellow masters of what might be deemed duoquinquagenet prestidigitation. You know, card tricks.

They include American Richard Turner, France’s Alexandra Duvivia, Briton Michael Vincent and Juan Tamariz of Spain, the last of whom makes an elegant argument that magic is a mix of theatre (because it’s live) and cinema (because it concerns itself with dreams) and illusion.

Farquhar watches each of these wondrous sleight-of-hand experts do one of their favourite routines, which he then learns and inserts into his own new bit. In it, he uses a deck of cards to tell the story of the death of Charles VIII (the King of Hearts, whom you’ll notice is being stabbed by an extra set of hands) at the behest of Anne of France (the Queen of Spades, and the only queen facing “the wrong way.”)

He even premieres the show in the very Loire Valley castle where Charles VIII died, 525 years earlier.

Two other things worth mentioning about Lost in the Shuffle. First, if you’re tickled by card magic, track down Ricky Jay and his 52 Assistants, a wondrous 1996 hour-long TV special now available, like so much else in these future times, on YouTube.

Second, this film ends with a short description of the number of possible configurations of a deck of cards. It’s written 52!, which works out to an eight followed by 67 zeros.

Put another way, if you put one trillion planets around every star in our galaxy, and a trillion people on each planet, and had them shuffle 1,000 decks of cards every second since the universe began, they’d be about halfway through the combinations by now. That is some practical magic!

Lost in the Shuffle. Directed by Jon Ornoy. With Shawn Farquhar. Screens August 22 at the Rio in Vancouver; August 26 and 27 at the Revue in Toronto; and September 10 on demand.