Hyenas
The plot by now must be well known; a flamboyant, much-married millionairess returns to the Middle-European town where she was born and offers the inhabitants a free gift of a billion marks if they will consent to murder the man who, many years ago, seduced and jilted her….Eventually, and chillingly, her chosen victim is slaughtered, but I quarrel with those who see the play merely as a satire on greed. It is really a satire on bourgeois democracy. The citizens…vote to decide whether the hero shall live or die, and he agrees to abide by their decision. Swayed by the dangled promise of prosperity, they pronounce him guilty. The verdict is at once monstrously unjust and entirely democratic. When the curtain falls, the question that Herr Dürrenmatt intends to leave in our minds is this: at what point does economic necessity turn democracy into a hoax?”
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These words of wisdom from Kenneth Tynan, written in 1960 about Friedrich Durrenmatt’s 1956 play The Visit, are well worth recalling when you make your way to the Film Center this week or next to see Djibril Diop Mambety’s wonderful Senegalese feature Hyenas (1992) at the Black Harvest International Film and Video Festival. The amazing thing about this African adaptation of a famous Swiss tragicomedy is how close it remains to the spirit of its source, as well as what Tynan says about it, despite the fact that it’s also African to the core. When I first saw Hyenas at the Locarno film festival three summers ago I assumed it was at most a loose reworking of the Durrenmatt play, despite Mambety’s insistence to the contrary. But then my knowledge of The Visit came from the arty mess Bernhard Wicki made of it with Ingrid Bergman and Anthony Quinn in 1964; when I finally got around to reading the play it was obvious that Mambety had thoroughly respected his source material. The Visit is one great play; whether this is one great movie as well is something I’m still trying to figure out. But it’s certainly a serious adapatation, and you shouldn’t miss it.
Missing from Tynan’s plot summary are the insidious steps over several weeks by which the villagers con themselves into murdering the hero, who runs a general store. In the movie this store is also the local bar and cafe. (From here on, I’ll call the characters by their names in Mambety’s film: the hero, played by Mansour Diouf, is Draman Drameh; his vindictive ex-lover, played by Ami Diakhate, is Linguere Ramatou.)
Hyenas is Mambety’s second full-length feature; his first, the remarkable Touki Bouki, was made almost 20 years earlier. For the past two decades he’s been working mainly as a stage and film actor in Senegal and Italy, and his wonderful way of handling actors throughout Hyenas undoubtedly stems in part from his own magisterial sense of presence.
