Gavin is also in love with Lisa, the Burgermeister’s daughter, and has secret meetings with her in the enclosed garden of her house, as if they were characters in an Arabian Nights tale. The scene in the garden is one of sun-dappled innocence, the two children finding a moment together in a private paradise before going back out into the fallen world. They are like a new Adam and Eve in this corrupt and plague-ridden land, offering the possibility of a new start.

The contrast between innocent youth and debased maturity reflects the exaggerated generational divide of the 60s, a divide which was viewed by some in morally absolute terms. It is the elder Melius, however, who takes up the countercultural cry during his trial, holding out hope for an alternative to a deadening world of grubby power play, materialistic greed and oppressive religion. In what amounts to an explicit statement of Demy’s creed, he looks forward to a future in which we will have learned ‘to tolerate each other’s differences…and even to rejoice in them’. His words are met with snarls and sneering looks of contempt from his accusers. Melius is the outsider within the town walls.

He is visibly different in dress and physical appearance, and also suspicious in his book-learning, independent of any institutional support and sanction as it is and thus betokening a dangerous freedom of thought and belief. His is potentially the rational voice of scholarly reason, free from the distorting gravity of power. But the pull of that power on weaker minds proves greater than the vital need for truth, and his fate is thereby written and sentence passed. At the same time, the Hamelin authorities’ willed ignorance condemns the greater part of their town to death.

Melius’ dawn execution forms the climax of the film. As he is led to the stake, the piper takes up his recorder once more and begins to draw the children from their early morning beds. It’s a symbolic awakening, leading them into a new dawn whilst their parents sleep or watch the execution, and is in contrast with his enchantment of the rats, which took place in darkness, with the powers that be looking on. Here, the gloomy, benighted world is being left behind even as its violent authority becomes more overt, made manifest in the daylit town square.

Donovan’s piper leads the children away from Hamelin, from the sight of Melius’ burning, from the plague, from conscription into foreign wars, and from a future of political oppression and religious persecution. They dance out of the town and into the meadows beyond, singing and playing instruments. Gavin struggles to keep up with them, desperately calling out for Lisa, but to no avail. And then, in the blink of an eye or the splicing edit of a frame, they disappear in a solar flare of lens glare. The piper’s act is seen as one of salvation rather than of terrible revenge for the duplicity of the burghers in not paying him for ridding the town of the plague rats.

This mercenary aspect to the old tale is not a significant factor in the film. When the payment initially agreed upon is refused, and the piper turns down a derisory alternate sum offered by the Burgermeister after the rats have been washed away in the river, his reaction is akin to a shrug. It’s as if this was no more than he expected all along. His salvation of the town from the plague is instantly forgotten, the onlookers drifting off with little more than awkward and muted thanks. He communes with a single rat which has been left behind, just as Gavin will be at the end. His otherness is further evinced by the genuine empathy he seems to exhibit towards this reviled creature. It’s an exchange which seems more genuine than those he’s had with the humans he’s encountered here. But his reaction is one of sadness rather than anger or disgust, and gives an insight into his motives for leading the children’s parade at the end.

...and out into the dawn meadows with the children

His enchantment of the children occurs as a direct reaction to Melius’ imminent immolation. We don’t see where they go; some fairyland equivalent of Gavin and Lisa’s garden, perhaps. But they go there full of joy, singing and dancing. And anywhere is better than this world, it is suggested. Franz, supervising the execution, hears the flute’s dancing pastoral melody drifting off in the distance, and feels an instinctive loathing for its light-hearted, optimistic airiness. He drowns it out with a music more in tune with the world which he intends to build with his commercial and ecclesiastical allies – the uniform, martial beat of his guards’ snare drums.

 The pre-final credits historical summary, setting the film in context in classical Hollywood style, looks forward to the atrocities of the religious persecutions and inquisitions to come, which Melius’ execution anticipates. With the statement that they would ‘remain without parallel until this century’ we are brought into the present, and the contemporary relevance of this fable is made plain. The bowl of the guards’ helmets has a stormtrooper curve, with horned metal spikes at the sides giving it an extra satanic embellishment. The execution of Melius’, the Jew, and the suspicion cast upon the players, who are referred to contemptuously as gypsies, bring to mind Nazi genocidal murder and the repeated demonising of outsiders and ethnic groups as a verminous ‘other’ throughout history.

The chaos which descends on Hamelin at the end of the film, with people leaving on wagons piled high with their belongings, also brings to mind the mass displacement caused by warfare, ancient and modern. If the piper has led the children away from the world until it is a fit place for them to live in then, Demy suggests, that world has not yet come into being. In some ways, then, this is another 70s film about the failure of the 60s countercultural dream. It’s a sobering conclusion to this brightly coloured fable with a heavy and brooding heart.

Le Frère du Guerrier est un film français de Pierre Jolivet, sorti en 2002.

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Cast
Vincent Lindon : Thomas
Guillaume Canet : Arnaud
Mélanie Doutey : Guillemette
François Berléand : le curé
Brunelle Lemonnier : Hilde
Frédéric Lacave : Benoît
Thierry-Perkins Lyautey : le chef des brigands
Roch Leibovici : le Chauve
Manuel Le Lièvre : le Bossu
Christophe Vandevelde : le Casque
Augustin Legrand : le Moustachu
Anthony Decadi : Le Giton
Philippe Fretun : le créancier
Franck Gourlat : Adémar
Arlette Thomas : l'abbesse
Frédérique Moidon : la prieure
Josiane Lévêque : l’aumônière
Anne Le Ny : Mme de Moteron
Olivier Augrond : le compagnon de Thomas
Ludovic Schoendoerffer : le prisonnier noble
Catherine Davenier : la fermière
Pascal Leguennec : le marchand
Sylvie Herbert : la mère Cantien
Annie Mercier : la femme Castelet