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.

A dark and smoky affair that, although set in Germany during the Black Death summer of 1349, suggests something brainstormed in a St. Marks Place head shop.

Too often Demy has seemed to be doing little but produce cinematic candy floss; this admittedly imperfect film of Browning's poem is at least trying for more.

With this English film, beautiful and inexplicably unprecedented, Demy refines his mythology.