Hyänen

Hyenes is a foreign film from Senegal adapted from a play, The Visit, by Swiss playwright Friedrich Dirrenmatt. It is spoken in the local language with English subtitles.

This film is surreal. It makes political statements and explains how a poor, failing village becomes prosperous by the greed of it's residents and the revenge of one of it's former community members.

Linguere Ramatou, played by Ami Diakhate, was once a young women who left her home village under less than honorable terms and has now become wealthy. She returns to her village to bestow a large sum of money so that the poor village can become a prosperous city. However, she seeks revenge upon her once seducer Dramaan, played by Mansour Diouf.

Dramaan had abandoned Ramatou when they were young forcing her to go to the city to engage in "the oldest profession." Now, Dramaan is an elder grocer granting good on credit to the unemployed villagers whom come to his store much to the displeasure of his wife and co-store keeper.

The villagers, learning that Ramatou is returning after many years to bestow money upon the village, appoints Dramaan the local mayor and instructs him to once again "woo" Ramatou so that she will make a large contribution to the village of Colobane.

What happens next is a surreal tale of how Dramaan fawns over his once love and her reactions to this lover from long ago.

The simple actions of Dramaan are often funny as well as the actions of the village's local officials. Ramatou is willing to provide the large endowment to the village on one condition. You need to see the movie to know that condition and how a "soul" is traded for the donation.

The village customs are interesting for Westerners whom may have little or no knowledge of some African customs. It is a little difficult to follow the fast movie English subtitles while listening to the dialogue in Senegalese. The film may need to be viewed more than once for the Westerner to fully comprehend the story and motivations of the principal players.

A stunning adaptation of Friedrich Durrenmatt's coldly brilliant play, The Visit, HYENES (hyenas) actually improves on the story by transposing the action to a Senegalese village. A fabulously wealthy old woman, who was born in the village but run out in disgrace as pregnant youth, returns and promises the villagers a fortune on one condition: that they kill the man who ruined her, an aged man who is the town's popular, good-natured grocer.

By moving the story from Durrenmatt's European setting to a dirt-poor African village, all the tensions are heightened, and the director Mambety sets the huge issues in high relief against the desert backdrop: justice, betrayal, revenge, guilt, greed (or need?), loyalty, and charity are played out in a searing (and searingly beautiful) desert, filmed with the grace of Bergman and written with the wryness of Bunuel. There are no good guys. It's up to you if there are bad guys. Everyone is a predator.

After the twenty-year period of silence following the success of 'Touki Bouki', Mambéty's second film gives its satire a more analytical frame. The quasi-allegorical narrative structure explores the relation of past to present within a specifically-though exaggerated-political frame; its events are specifically set in a collective context, where the continuing legacy of imperialism as it effects relations gendered, sexual and economic relations in the (post)colony. Returning to her village as a fabulously wealthy citizen, for whom wealth is also index of damage, literal prosthesis-the arm made of gold!- Linguère Ramatou is something like 'Touki Bouki's' Anta some decades on, returned to take revenge on Dramaan Drameh, the man who abandoned her and has since taken up a role as a comfortable, well-liked bar owner-and a kind of de facto, unofficial mayor-within the still impoverished town. The devil's bargain-that her wealth will be that of the village if they execute him-is not only index of personal revenge, a kind of just deserts for the past sins of patriarch-Drameh paid false witnesses to testify that he was not the father of her child, leading her to be driven out of town and to a career as a sex worker-but of the inhuman and dehumanising bargains of global capital, the mendacious ways in which continuing underdevelopment and the power relations of the centre-periphery relation structure the life it's possible to live. Ramatou simply serves as the agent of the ways in which collectives are divided-whether by the structures of gendered power relations or by the 'hyena-like' rapaciousness the promise of money brings. Such economic structures rely on the mythic realities that any dream can be bought, and that its fulfilment will invariably come at the expense of others. Through a satirical broad-brush, Mambéty seeks to make such bargains specific, rather than the abstract underlay of virtually every human interaction; it makes a vivid and convincing case whose laughs have the sting of accuracy.

Djibril Diop Mambéty's Hyenas doesn't quite jump the shark to the extent of Eugène Ionesco's Rhinoceros, a corrosive social satire which dramatizes the macro and micro fallibility of humankind by having people literally transform into the titular safari animal... but so searingly incisive is Mambéty's critique that you get the sense he's at least toyed with the idea. Adapting Swiss-German satirist Friedrich Dürrenmatt's play The Visit, Mambéty ups the stakes of the text's Sophie's choice scenario (is one man's life worth untold millions for a town fallen into ruin?) by setting it in rural Senegal, wherein the collective battle of moralism and pride against a paradigm shift of wealth is amplified to poignant and sobering heights. As such, Hyenas serves to both savagely lambast the corrosive legacy of colonialism in a recently independent Senegal, while equally shedding the spotlight of judgment on the role of virtue in a capitalist society - an experience which generally proves equally squirmy for the average viewer, as for the characters onscreen. Hyenas is billed as a dark comedy, but, apart from trace elements of allegorical magic realism (we never find out exactly how an exiled, former teenage prostitute has become "richer than the world's bank"), there's only the bleakest, most mirthless of incredulous guffaws to be found therein. Instead, Mambéty wrings out every last drop of uncomfortable empathy in depicting a poor but proud people steadily succumbing to materialistic, murderous mob mentality* - a scenario that starts absurd, but quickly becomes far too familiar. Mambéty's witty screenplay deftly unspools each wrinkle of collective corruption, from the nattily dressed mayor bemoaning the degraded state of his town, oblivious to the rag-wearing homeless man bemusedly building a fire immediately behind him, to the townspeople vocally expressing their outrage ("She thinks we're Americans who would kill each other for nothing!") while blatantly strutting around wearing their bribes, practically collectively willing the murder into a fatalistic eventuality. As the situation escalates, Mambéty lets the poignancy of the joke fester. Things may start with comparative levity, (Mambéty turns each townsperson lobbying for new refrigerators and air conditioners into a sordid, Oprah-esque gameshow), but it isn't long before the initial paradoxical joviality decays into a literal torch-bearing mob (the town gaslighting their 'walking dead' peer by barring him entrance to a train leaving town while wishing him a good trip is genuinely hard to watch), before culminating in a dirge of chanting, shuffling zombies. Though Hyenas is, for the most part, a slow, sombre, methodical film, Mambéty lends it a larger-than-life aesthetic grandeur. His cinematography employs a high saturation rate, with the vibrancy of colours (glaring, aggressive reds, and the encroaching, corrupting sheen of gold) popping against the beige of (gorgeously shot) sweeping expanses of desert perfectly encapsulating the intoxicating allure of colonial socioeconomic transformation. Similarly, Wasis Diop's moody guitar score lends a thoughtful, eulogistic dignity to the slow, fatalistic social decay at play. While some of Mambéty's visual metaphors are a touch hit-and-miss (while having the townspeople slowly adapt hairstyles recalling hangman's nooses is a slick piece of visual trickery, his Modern Times-esq consistent cross-cutting between brewing mobs and a pack of snarling hyenas is a bit too on-the-nose), the consistent framing device of herds of local animals stirring uneasily (including a poor captive monkey at the film's central hub, who ends up becoming a disapproving Greek chorus unto itself) does lend the film an effectively disquieting restlessness. And as for the perplexing, sneaky ambiguity of the film's final shot? Mambéty is content to let the viewer stew, and draw their own conclusions. As the formerly "most popular man in Colobane" turned 'most likely to be assassinated,' Mansour Diouf anchors the film with an immaculately balanced performance that shifts from irreverent goofiness, to exasperated histrionics, before finishing with a quieter, sadder dignity. He carefully toes the line of remaining sympathetic without ever becoming too likeable throughout, instead wearing his flawed humanity on his sleeve with a gentle, sad, side-smile. As the imposingly wealthy homecoming Linguère Ramatou, Ami Diakhate steals the show with a formidable, commanding presence. In less capable hands, Ramatou, with her devious master plan and golden artificial limbs, would play like a Bond villain - but Diakhate ensures that Ramatou's vitriol is grounded in a lifetime of real, radiating hurt, which Diakhate rawly embodies with consummate class. Faly Gueye consistently steals scenes with an icy deadpan humour as Diouf's perennially unimpressed wife, while Mahourédia Gueye pompously postures like the best of them as the town's blustery mayor.

Fuelled with the timeless wisdom of a Classical Greek tragedy, yet coursing with the contemporary, acrid urgency of an itching postcolonial critique, Mambéty's Hyenas is a stirring, vibrant, and grimly entrancing watch. Although one can't help but with that Mambéty had dialled back the somewhat overblown visual symbolism a tad, and instead redirected that energy into a shade more of the tension-breaking humour just aching to surface, his film remains an unflinchingly striking watch. A cornerstone of contemporary African cinema, Hyenas is a timeless snarl at the overbearing fatalism of colonialism and capitalism - and, over 25 years on, it hasn't lost a whit of potency or relevance.

-8.5/10

*How's THAT for alliteration?

Dürrenmatt's play The Visit is one of the best stories ever told about guilt and honesty. Would it be ruined by being transferred to a village in Africa by a visionary director whose main quality is to create images? That's what I asked myself before watching Hyenas.

And I was surprised in the most positive way. Diop Mambéty hardly changed the plot but supplied it with wonderful images which can only be found in Africa. So why didn't he change the story? Because he didn't have to. The story of the old lady taking revenge on her home village in the most cruel way fits perfectly into the context Mambéty placed it. It seems as though the story had never been imagined to take place in Switzerland; Senegal absorbs it completely.

The choice of Ami Diakhate is maybe the most perfect ever made by any film or stage director, as regards the role of Dürrenmatt's old lady. She has the mark of death and bitterness on her, the condescension of the rich and the hatred of those who have been humiliated. The other actors are charming, also well-cast, though sometimes I felt they would have needed a little more directoral guidance. However, my untrained European eye was not expected too much of: in some Asian, Afroamerican or African movies (shame on me) it is very hard for me to tell the various characters apart, which was not the case in Hyenas.

A wonderful story, a wonderful film. A pity that I will probably never see it again.