Krambambuli (1998)

The film depicts, in three acts, a duel between the new head forester, Georg Walch, and a poacher known only as “the Yellow One” because of his clothes. In civilian life, the Yellow One is Wolf Pachler, a disreputable womanizer and drunkard. The first act concerns Pachler’s wire-haired hunting dog, Krambambuli, whom the newly arrived head forester Walch bargains away from the drunken Pachler during a stop at an inn, offering him twelve bottles of cherry schnapps and a large sum of money. Walch learns that Pachler named the dog after the schnapps he is drinking from a bottle at that very moment. The animal is devoted to its master and refuses to go with its new master after the deal. Walch eventually manages to drag the dog out of the inn and load it onto his wagon in a sack. Once at the forester’s lodge, he spends weeks trying, to his wife Johanna’s displeasure, to teach the chained dog that he is its new master. The dog bites him several times and refuses food, as well as water at first. With great perseverance, Walch finally succeeds in getting Krambambuli to accept him as its new master. In the second act, Walch’s wife, herself the daughter of an innkeeper, goes without a male escort to the gloomy village inn called the “Black Boar.” The “Black Boar” is the local poachers’ regular haunt. Pachler asks an acquaintance to harass her so that he can then step in and make a show of beating the man. But the innkeeper’s daughter sees through the setup. When the head forester Walch hears about it from his maid, he goes to the inn himself the next evening, where he gets into a brawl with Pachler. Shortly afterward, a gamekeeper is stabbed to death by a poacher caught in the act. The foresters begin searching for Pachler, since the head forester has learned the wanted man’s name from a poacher who was arrested with his shotgun ready. But that night, the wanted man is not in the village, where he is being sought; he is at the forester’s lodge, in the hay with Walch’s wife. The third act depicts the head forester’s encounter with Pachler in the woods. The poacher shoots his pursuer. Both call for the dog, who is torn between them but finally chooses his former master. The head forester shoots the poacher. He also wants to kill Krambambuli, but cannot bring himself to do it. When the forester later returns home, his wife has already packed her suitcases to leave him. Krambambuli remains sitting beside his former master’s body, but later seeks the company of his new master again. The latter eventually finds him outside his door, starved and frozen to death.