Review: The Pied Piper

Jacques Demy’s film is as distanced and uncertain as The Young Girls of Rochefort is ecstatically sure of itself.

The Pied Piper
Photo: Paramount Pictures

Jacques Demy’s version of The Pied Piper is as distanced and uncertain as his masterpiece The Young Girls of Rochefort is ecstatically sure of itself. Watching this interesting but failed film, it becomes clear just how much Demy depended on the music of Michel Legrand for his essential quality of splurging romance. Pied Piper cries out for the charge of Legrand’s music, but all it gets is the hippy-dippy, Ye Olde Medieval noodlings of Donovan, who is best known for his radio hit “Mellow Yellow” and for being a film-long in-joke for Bob Dylan in D.A. Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back. Donovan looks like Roger Daltrey’s younger, personality-free brother, and his doughy lack of affect casts a pall over the production, so that even seasoned scenery-chewers like John Hurt, Donald Pleasance and Diana Dors (playing a matron called Frau Poppendick!) get lost in the tentative, hazy blue and greens of the mise-en-scène. Demy doesn’t do much with the rats infesting the town, and his treatment of the corrupt clergy and other officials has no weight or complexity. He seems to be attempting a serious statement on renewal and purity, but winds up with nothing but preachiness and aimless camera movement. Existentialist underpinnings are lobbed at us in dialogue, but only one scene feels like Demy, when Jack Wild’s Gavin tells a girl he loves that he is trying to capture her soul in a portrait. Otherwise, Demy’s Pied Piper lacks that touch of magic that activated his earlier movies so beautifully.

Score: 
 Cast: Donovan, John Hurt, Donald Pleasance, Jack Wild, Diana Dors  Director: Jacques Demy  Screenwriter: Andrew Birkin, Jacques Demy, Mark Peploe  Distributor: Paramount Pictures  Running Time: 91 min  Rating: G  Year: 1972  Buy: Video

Dan Callahan

Dan Callahan’s books include The Camera Lies: Acting for Hitchcock , Barbara Stanwyck: The Miracle Woman, and Vanessa: The Life of Vanessa Redgrave. He has written about film for Sight & Sound, Film Comment, Nylon, The Village Voice, and more.

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