The Pied Piper (Jacques Demy, 1972)

 

Jacques Demy’s underrated The Pied Piper could be viewed as lacking focus, the title narrative almost crowded out by an emphasis on the conniving of church and state; for a children’s film (of sorts anyway -  I recall it being shown on daytime British TV back in the day) there’s a persistent emphasis on death, bigotry and venality. As such, it provides yet more evidence of Demy’s mischievously perverse streak: the casting of an amiably diffident Donovan as the piper might suggest a somewhat fluffy approach, but any such impression would be highly offset by the estimable (and very British, for a film set in Germany) presence of John Hurt, Donald Pleasence, even Diana Dors! (there’s also Oliver Twist’s Jack Wild, his prematurely worn appearance in itself rather poignantly resonant). The film is bookended by the arrival and departure of a family of traveling performers, but Demy hardly bothers to develop them as characters, his attention shifting between the financial strains caused both by the construction of a cathedral and by pending wars, a Jewish alchemist persecuted by the religious establishment, a lovelessly strategic marriage (all the creepier for the casting of a 13-year-old actress), and the core plague/piper narrative, at times seeming here almost like an afterthought, but perhaps all the more persuasive for that, rendering the piper’s discomfiting revenge almost an inevitable consequence of wrong-headed governing decisions (he leaves behind the children of the kind and tolerant itinerant family). And then the closing scroll highlights the numbers who died of the plague and the persistent religious persecution, causing us to wonder whether we’ve all along been watching a more conventional historical epic than we realized (especially, perhaps, as the closing credits reveal the film to be an early production of David Puttnam, a decade or so before providing British cinema with its big night at the Oscars).