The Pied Piper
Directed by Jacques Demy
We are in the dark ages of film culture which means the revival of Jacques Demy’s rarely-shown 1971 The Pied Piper at Anthology Film Archives is especially apt. Set in 1349, “Year of the Black Death,” The Pied Piper’s Dark Ages story seems ideal for a period when the highest praise for a film is “dark” (as in the actual recent blurbs “Alfonso Cuarón’s Harry Potter movie is the darkest yet” and “Babe: Pig in the City is darker than the original”). With The Pied Piper, Demy addresses life when it was really grim and not just an occasion when thrill seekers with cabin fever go to some mean creek or hostel, making a descent to saw away at their own sensitivities. Demy uses the hysteria, prejudices and craven living conditions of an unenlightened era to parallel modern times.
This dark, not-immediately ingratiating film from the usually buoyant director of Lola and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg isn’t the anomaly it may first seem. Demy has not forsaken his usual sense of enchantment, but makes plain that his romantic view of life is a choice made with full awareness that sadness, unfairness, suffering, deceit and death are real. (Lola and Umbrellas are great films because they are radiant despite dark undercurrents.) For moviegoers who esteem Demy’s oeuvre—or those who think it’s frivolous—The Pied Piper is essential viewing.
It has taken years to understand that Demy‘s The Pied Piper is not really a family movie. Like Robert Altman’s phenomenal Popeye—a big-budget studio adaptation of a cartoon that Altman turned into a stylized epic vision of American habits and personalities—The Pied Piper works best for adults, not children. No longer merely a folk tale, Demy’s The Pied Piper preserves the ’60s zeitgeist of flower power agape against the realization of the harsh, venal and untrustworthy Establishment.
Demy’s willingness to transform the Brothers Grimm folk tale, to deliver art against the commercial expectation of a family entertainment, makes this a fascinating experiment. The Pied Piper should be properly understood as a great director’s world vision. The process by which a director turns pop into art can be seen in the way Demy seriously engages the story’s medieval setting. Its focus on a band of performers who travel through European towns suffering The Plague at first recalls Ingmar Bergman’s medieval masterpiece The Seventh Seal. Demy’s troupe picks up a wandering minstrel—the piper played by pop singer Donovan—as they attempt to provide entertainment, while also struggling to survive.
A darkly probing, realistic style distinguishes The Pied Piper from the fairy-tale benignity of Demy’s Donkey Skin. That was a film of sexual homilies while this examines the social mores apparent in the town of Hamelin’s burgormeister (Roy Kinnear), its repressive church and its outsider Jewish alchemist Melius (Michael Hordern) who is accused of causing the plague of disease-carrying rats. Melius could be talking about this year’s Oscars when he laments, “There’s no craftsmanship, no standards, just greed. It makes me wonder if I believe in God.”
Demy’s belief in love as the highest expression of human nature comes through in The Pied Piper’s story of outsiders and artists. (Demy named his son Matthieu after the troupe leader Mattio played by Keith Buckley.) Thankfully, The Pied Piper is not a banal WWII parable like the simple-minded Pan’s Labyrinth, which exploits history yet fails to engage it. Demy wisely connects the past to the present through his shrewd observation of Superstition, Economics, Art. It comes together in the wedding celebration for the burgormeister’s daughter where a cathedral-shaped cake is eaten from the inside by rats—an image that puts all of Pan’s Labyrinth to shame.
For Demy, one of the French New Wave innovators, transforming the folk tale into something original and distinctive was part of the same modernist project by which Godard and Truffaut adapted popular Hollywood fiction to their own means. Demy’s experiment anticipated later, deliberately artificial period pieces made by Eric Rohmer with Percival, Jacques Rivette with Wuthering Heights. But Demy’s realistic sense of cruelty throughout history is singular. His opening shot of a Joan of Arc tapestry suggests the influence of Carl Dreyer’s spiritually-driven view of the past. It bookends the redemptive climax where Donovan pays back Hamelin’s deceitful town fathers by luring away their children—a late-’60s hippie’s vision. Demy was no pretend revolutionary, but he had a revolutionary faith in innocence.
