'Mrs. Hyde': Isabelle Huppert Is Delightfully Madcap [Review]

The classic Robert Louis Stevenson story of split identities is given another cinematic treatment in Serge Bozon‘s “Mrs. Hyde,” which stars Isabelle Huppert as the titular character, although she is at first just Madame Gequil — a dissatisfied physics teacher at a blue-collar high-school mostly filled with kids from an immigrant background. At first, playing like a parody of “Dangerous Minds,” the structural and ruling management of Madame Gequil’s classes is all over the place, and whenever she appears for her afternoon tech class, chaos ensues among the students. She even, at times, with the unruly behavior happening in front of her very eyes, just gives up and cocoons at her desk like an expressionless zombie.

However, there is a student that catches her eye. Malik (Adda Senani), handicapped with a birth defect and in crutches, becomes the sort of “guinea pig” Gequil never thought could possibly satisfy her raison d’etre. Saddled with off-school problems relating to gangs, Malik is taken under the Madame’s wings, and made not just into a better student, but a better person as well. It unfolds with Bozon winking at the audience at every turn and never taking it all so seriously. This is his own version of the inspirational student/teacher drama, but it works in both comic and dramatic levels.

At home, Mr. Gequil (Jose Garcia), a loving husband that even prepares daily dinners for his wife, doesn’t seem to light a switch in Madame. She barely eats his food and, hilariously, feeds it to the neighborhood dog. The pivotal moment we’ve all been waiting for occurs when Madame is struck by lightning in her private laboratory. The transformation occurs, albeit in refreshing ways. It’s a radical change which has our depressed professor lighting up at every turn, able to burn things with a single touch, which proves highly dangerous because our beloved Madame Gequil is a sleepwalker! On the plus side, she now has an unquenching appetite for her husband’s meals, which have him wondering what happened to the bird-like hunger and social timidness of his significant other.

Don’t expect any exploration of opposite identities here. Bozon isn’t necessarily interested in Stevenson’s classic themes of the id. This is after all a filmmaker that loves to play with the farcical aspects of cinema to one-up his audience at every turn. The Madame/Hyde dilemma takes a backseat on psychology, instead focusing on the titular character’s hijinks in and out of the lab. There is a social critique here, having to do with the French school system’s lackluster education of underprivileged students. It’s a topic that resonates in the French quarters of Paris as much as it does here in the states.

The mix of genres is quite loony, but never boring, all thanks to Bozon, an actor and sometimes director, who wrote the screenplay with regular partner-in-crime Axelle Ropert. There’s plenty of gothic screwball comedy in the film which gives it a non-serious allure you might not expect from a Stevenson adaptation, not to mention it takes pride in also being a teacher/student movie like the aforementioned Michelle Pfeiffer flick, or even the Hilary Swank inspirational drama “Freedom Fighters,” which sadly has Bozon delivering a manipulative ending to his otherwise liberating farce of a film.

The film is a trifle, albeit one spiked with mirth and malice. It certainly is an opportunity for the always great Huppert to ham it up onscreen, something we rarely see her do in the, mostly, seriously-driven dramatic roles she seems to embark on yearly.  This is her second film with Bozon, the equally delirious “Tip-Top” being the initial collaboration, but constant tonal changes and a second half that somehow loses itself in over-indulgent dialogue dampen what’s, for the most part, an enjoyable affair.

No matter, it’s refreshing to watch Huppert’s madcap dash of a performance, playing a character constantly at war with herself and who she wants to be in life. It’s a mid-life crisis like no other seen before, which is no surprise given Bozon’s reputation for the absurd. Despite the inspired bits, the film feels very much like the split personality syndrome invading Gequil’s body, going back and forth between themes and genres, but never truly knows what it wants to be. Maybe that was Bozon’s intention, but the misguidedness turns the viewer on and off repeatedly throughout the film. [C+]

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