Hyènes

When “Der Besuch der alten Dame” premiered in Zurich in early 1956, Friedrich Dürrenmatt couldn’t have guessed that the story of a wealthy woman corrupting a whole village was destined to become a key text for the second half of the 20th century – how obvious it might look in hindsight. After turning into a world-wide success story, a first film version was made in 1963 by Bernard Wicki as a star-studded international co-production that moved the story from small-town Switzerland to a vaguely Balkan place and changed the merciless original finale into a Happy End. No such nonsense with Djibril Diop Mambéty! What looks at first like a mildly exotic take on Dürrenmatt proves on closer inspection to be the most congenially accurate adaptation of this particular work for cinema and television alike. That said: Djibril Diop Mambéty couldn’t persuade himself to be quite as cold and cynical as Dürrenmatt: Linguère Ramatou still sees to it that all citizens of Colobane take part in the murder of Dramaan Drameh who betrayed her when she was young, but it’s done in a decidedly more colorful fashion than anybody here would dare, not to mention those cheeky surrealist touches added by the master in his inimitable fashion. (Olaf Möller)