DVD: The Pied Piper of Hutzovina

Early on in this film the motives of Eugene Hutz and his exploration of the music of his gypsy ancestors are thrown into question. Entering a garden in a rundown gypsy camp in Zakarpattia, Ukraine, this hip troubadour hands his guitar to an enquiring local. Although noticing a missing string, the man plucks, strums and slides with the ease and articulation of a teacher guiding a pupil. When asked where his guitar is by Hutz, he smiles and says: “I don’t have one. Guitars are too expensive.”

At that point, Hutz, an NME ‘cool list’ contender and frontman of New York-based gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello, seems starkly out of place – his journey to play music with real gypsies no more than slumming it with talented, poor, forgotten people. However, the realisation that follows, as the man’s neighbours clamour round with an ensuing eruption of song and dance, is that Hutz’s journey is to learn, to discover the “gypsy root” and that he is celebratory, not threatened, when that involves unearthing superior talent to his own.

Hutz’s exuberance in gathering knowledge of Ukrainian folk music is welcomed with amused intrigue in the Carpathian region and his home town of Kiev. But in a devastating scene his self-styled gypsy hip-hop is rejected by the head of the Kiev Gypsy Theatre as a threat to their enduring tradition. In characteristic form, the musician muses on their immutable differences: “I come from a fucking punk rock background. I’m building my way back into the gypsy tradition.”

Throughout, the enamoured filmmaker Pavla Fleischer is one step behind Hutz. Apart from a mutual love of gypsy music, her main reason for following Hutz is amorous, though not reciprocal as Hutz is accompanied by his lover whom is never filmed. Fleischer’s increasingly concerned voiceovers about the enigmatic Hutz betray the carefree relationship depicted on camera and it becomes clear that if he is the pied piper, then she is one of the innocents of the fairytale, doomed in her uncontrollable urge to follow.

What is unfortunate is that this relationship of mutual appreciation on the edge of obsession is not sufficiently scrutinised. At the film’s close Fleischer sums up Hutz’s journey and naively attributes his working-class childhood as the reason for his musical driving force. What remains subtly overlooked is the director’s need to be around Hutz and her compulsion to follow. With this omitted, even moments as disarming as Hutz accompanying his grandmother through songs in his family’s tower block apartment cannot prevent the feeling that only half of the story has been told. Beren Neale

Buy it here, comrade.