NYFF Review: ‘Mrs. Hyde’

If there’s one thing Isabella Huppert gets, it’s respect. Yet in Mrs. Hyde, the latest from French director Serge Bozon, she plays a Marie Géquil, physics teacher who gets absolutely no respect. No from her students, not from her fellows tachers, not even the administration. The only person who sees her in a good light is her husband

Pierre (Jose Garcia), who spends his days at the house cooking and playing piano as Marie spends her days frustrated at work. After having enough of the stress that her interaction with students has brought her, she goes to her private worklab to blow of some steam.In the middle of her experiment her lab is struck by lightning which causes her to be shocked by an electrical current. She wakes up seemingly untouched, but oh, she is very much left altered forever by this event.

Bozon based his screenplay loosely on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with his own twist so one can see where this odd little indie is headed. Slowly she begins to change and whether that means finally getting the attention of troubled students such as Malik (Adda Senani) or mysterious scenes late at night where she wanders the streets as a powerful beam of light, she needs to find a balance between her own Jekyll and Hyde before both utterly consume her.

This film has some things to say about letting our work consume us but more importantly the important role of teachers and their impact on students. We live in a world where teachers are some of the most important figures in our young lives yet it seems that society mainly takes them for granted and doesn’t pay them the respect that they deserve.

Shot on film by Bozon’s longtime cinematographer Céline Bozon, the film is captured in a beautiful pallete that does fit the tone of all the schizophrenic behavior. If there’s one thing that holds it all together it’s of course the commanding screen presence of the great Huppert, who makes the most of the role and delivers in all the ways she was asked. This could be said about Adda Senani as a troubled boy whose behavior finally changes after finding some structure in his life around the newly altered Mrs. Hyde.

Bozon’s heart is in the right place for sure, but the influence of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde doesn’t feel like a natural, neccesary fit to this story and it never quite come together in a cohesive manner. There are many interesting moments and scenes that just don’t fit together structurally and it feels rather unfocused and scatterbrained throughout its duration.

Rating: 6.0/10