The good old days : this is my melodrama... Or Is It?; Djibril Diop Mambety's Hienas (1992)

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The Good Oíd Days:
This Is My Melodrama.,, Or Is It?;
D¡M Diop Mambety's Hjenas (M
CHRISTIAN LHGH
The New York Film Festival is always a cause for celebra-tion-.
A drop of gold rain drípped on to the surface of the
black dessert, it is often a New Yorker's (and an American's)
only occasion to see the new Jean-Luc Godard film, or
Agnes Váida, or Aki Kaurísmaki, or Theo Angeloupoloiis, or
Jacques Rivette —with English subtitles and on American
soil. That we are asked to siÍBer the latest affront by Jim Jar-musch
or Jacques Doilon in exchange, seems a small price to
pay, however painful the experience. Any true film scholar or
mere (mere?) fUm enthusiast who valúes the intemational
cinema and America's limited access to it for the past decade
or so (one of the worst cultural legacies of the Reagan era is
that the importation of European and intemational ñlms in-to
the United States became a harsher, costlier, more difflcult
process), not being in New York during the festival would be
the equivalent of a football fan being in Beirut on Superbowl
Sunday.
The 1992 festival, held as every year, in September, was a
cut below the regular fare. Usual super high standards appear
to have given way to a tendency toward pulp and notoriety,
as if an opportunity to appear viable to a larger though still
limited audience could atone in a way for the limited number
of films of interest let alone consequence presented for con-sumption
as if to the starving a dry bone thrown, the meat
cut off and eaten by others, perhaps those who wear jackets
and ties and place ads in the Sunday New York Times. Aside
from the newest Eric Rohmer film (this time, resonantly and
beautiñiUy on winter) and the compelling (if overrated) Neil
Jordán film Tbe Crying Game, there was Uttle to champion
or even discuss, unless one had the morbid inclination to
reach out to the immensely popular (and impossibly inane)
Spanish film Dream of Li^t (heaven forbid), Víctor Erice's
grossly moribund (and pathetic) mediation on the painter
Antonio López Garcia's loving relationship to his canvas, his
brush, his tubes of paint, his smock, his friend, and his sub-ject,
not to mention his less than charming self. Compared
with last year's festival stunner, Rivette's La Belle Noisseuse,
starring Michel Piccoli as an equally obsessed artist (talk
about flre in the eyes). García comes off as infatuated less
with his art than with his navel. We have all seen artists
behave this way in their studios, but the ímpetus for recor-ding
it permanently on celluloíd evades me and seems more
a weapon of blackmaíl than a conduit to ídolatry.
Erice's fílm, like a really boríng colleg6 professor's treatise
on the uplífting qualíty of mísery, endeavors with buckets and
buckets of sweat (all dríppíng) to reitérate the importance of
and guarantee the future of the quotation marks held fumly
around the word Art by formalísts and fascists alike, as if let-ting
go of this retrograde ideal might have dangerous rever-berations.
They're right, it would. This silly film would be
seen as the sham that it is. Watch out Hilton Kramer, here
is a film even you might like. While I would make no claims
against García's approach, work, or career (however boríng
I might fínd all of them), I cannot say the same for Erice,
who has the subtle touch of a drunkard gravedigger wearing
a blindfold. With every stiff stroke, he covers his hallowed
subject in piles of dirt. If his subject were alive, I might make
a case against him for murder. Instead, I did the easier thing
—I walked out the door, quickly and with great purpose.
There was one superb notable exception at the festival
however, one film that inspired not only celebration on my
part, but even, by tums, love, devotion, and great respect. Dji-bril
Diop Mambety's superior and moving Hyeaas made me
want to hire a one man band to play outside Lincoln Cen-ter's
Ahce Tully Hall to attract the attention that the film so
- A A^
/ " V A
Hyeaas (Senegal) de Djibril Diop Mambety. 1992.
deserved, but however sadly, would not receive at this time.
(I felt the same way at 199rs festival about Michael Tolkin's
ambitious failure fhe Rapture. It just had to be seen, if only
for Mimi Rogers's mind boggling brave, fresh, inventive per­formance.)
In many ways the power and meta-revelatory fra-mework
of Hyenas is the utter personification of Erice and
his ilk's worst nightmare. A film of great dedication told in
the style of a great tradition (melodrama) that is at once beau-tiful,
passionate, horrifying, and structurally subversive. If I
was moved to tears toward the end of the film by what Lau­ra
Mulvey has called "the struggle of the filmmaker", rather
than by the action depicted on the screen, I was simulta-neously
held in awe of its raw talent, Mambety's well shaped
and level headed mise-en-scene, and perhaps most of all, by
the film's canny ability to both transgress and reify its own
presence within (and outside of) the various cultural canons
it appropriates.
Hyenas is a melodrama. And it is a remake. A retelling.
Perhaps an untelling. It is a jagged and harsh sea of comple-xity
and contradiction. And it is brilliantly and emphatically
conceived, written, directed, edited, acted, and photographed.
And for anybody who has seen and appreciated either Frie-drich
Durrenmatt's play, or the 1964 Ingrid Bergman film
vehicle based on it, both titled The Visit, the improvement in
this telling should ring as clear as does that of Douglas Sirk's
latefifties versión of Imitation of Life staring Lana Turner
over the silly one that preceded it in the early 30's starring
Claudette Colbert. Durrenmatt's play is fíat and inarticulate,
and the Bergman film is a dud, though Bergman does an ins­pirad
if hammy star-turn not seen the likes of since her Jean
Renoir film Elena and Her Men. Rarely have cruelty and
revenge looked so glamorous, and like so much fun.
But as is always the case with melodrama, it is the story,
the plot —the events that unfold— that are of consequence
rather than the words telling or the subtleties of the telling.
Whether it be Stelh Dallas, Now, Voyager, Terms of Endear-ment,
or The Prínce of Tides, what defines a powerful melo­drama
is the empathetic emotional events that unfold within
the film's rather broad frame —they must be moving in the
particular and the abstract. That, and the strong central place
occupied by the woman. And the big bad wolf knocking at
the door. ("You must pay the rent."/"I can't pay the rent".)
Hyenas, thanks to Durrenmatt, has all of these qualities in
generous supply. The poignant if rough story of a town gone
to serious seed —even the mayor's house and the furniture
in it is seized by the state for back taxes and other debts. Its
last and only salvation is presented in the form of a retuming
home town girl who has made good in the world. Once an
innocent local waif seduced and abandoned and left pregnant
and branded a slut, a whore, and a liar by the locáis and the
man who denounced her in order than he may marry a more
prosperóos older woman, she is forced to leave town in
shame, humiliaton, and desperation. Now many years later,
the woman is a millionaire many times over (or a billionaire,
depending on the particular versión you are plugged in to),
and her ecstatically announced homecoming appears to offer
Hyeaas (Seaegal) de Djibril Diop Mambety. 1992.
the town its much needed patrón saint. Upon her arrival, the
woman agrees wholeheartedly, albeit with one stiff condition:
that the man who "ruined" her be killed.
Aside from Mambety's skillfully superior rendering of the
material, his primary displacement of it is to move the action
from a war torn town in Italy to a poverty stricken village
in Senegal. It is a decisión that is a willful as it is wise. By
refusing to place the blame for the town's poverty on the out-side
world so to speak, or the seed for its possible salvation
either, Mambety lays the foundation for grand drama, rather
than politically correct preaching. The face of the "enemy"
—the (female) wolf at the door— is identical to that of the
townspeople who must resist her hilarious bribes (refrigerators,
furniture, air conditioners, shoes, etc.) and to that of the man
who is eventually killed by his friends, who will have to live
wíth the burden of their crime as well. Furthermore, we are
never allowed to forget that it was the town's treatment of
this woman (her sex is not incidental to this scenario, it is
dependent on it) that has ultimately caused not only her
misery and her entry to the West, where she makes her for­tune
(her salvation), but her insatiable yearning for revenge
as well —and the ability to carry it out. And yet all of this
too is briUiantly neutralized by the touching scene in the film
where the woman meets her enemy, and the two reminisce
about their romance —the good oíd days, as it were.
Hyenas is adamantly not strictly a film of the new gob-bledygook
multiculturalism so fashionable of late among
young academics and merchants in sophisticated cuhure circles
intemationally, even though it does indeed emanate from Sene-gal.
Rather, Mambety takes the West at its postmodem word,
and then rewrites that word —rewrite, young man— from his
own incredible vantage point. Mambety's film has the power
of Ingmar Bergman at his best and the abstraction of Ber­nardo
Bertolucci at his most cogent. I have never really seen
anything like it, and it angers me that Mambety may not
have the opportunity to have the kind of career he should
have. Now I must clarify that I do not mean that if Mam­bety
does not have the sanction of Europe and America that
he is "doomed" to a career in África. My lament is not a
politícal one. As somebody who cares very deeply about the
cinema and its future (and the lack of talent we are experien-cing
in it and for it at the moment), I would like to have the
pleasure of seeing many films by Mambety over the next deca­des.
I would like it if he were to have the freedom to make
films (more or less) as regularly as the wishes, so that I can
see them, as I do new films year after year, by far less talen-ted
auteurs than he. If Steven Sondersbergh gets to make
Kafka and if Mike Newell gets to make Enchanted April and
if Jon Amiel can get away with Somtnersby, then Mambety
should be allowed to make or get away with any film he wis­hes.