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Serge Bozon's idiosyncratic Wwi musical comedy La France impressed me when I watched it some years ago. In it, he demystified war heroics and masculinity with his deadpan humor. In Mrs. Hyde, in his peculiar way, Bozon takes jabs at the failing education system where intelligence is willfully ignored and pent up rage and anger simmers just below the surface. The indomitable Isabelle Huppert plays Marie Géquil, a soft spoken, extremely ineffective Physics teacher in a rough suburban school where most of her students in her vocational class are comprised of rowdy, uninterested students of color. They incessantly make fun of her and scold her and have zero respect. But always good natured, Marie tries to get through to them, especially Malik (Adda Senani), her...

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Madame Hyde, Serge Bozon's fifth directorial feature and second collaboration with Isabelle Huppert, is a strange film—ingenious, but modestly scaled; often bewildering, yet somehow always intuitively right; a mix of familiar narratives that nonetheless manages to feel startlingly original. Conceived by regular screenwriter Axelle Ropert as a gender-swapped, comedic riff on Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 science-fiction tale The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde fused with the suburban classroom drama, it's a striking amalgam whose oddity may account for its Locarno Festival premiere, as opposed to a higher-profile film festival bow in Berlin, Cannes or Venice. Then again, that’s entirely unsurprising for a film that vibrates at such a rarefied frequency, whose movements are frisky and flighty, and the pleasures of which could easily be mistaken for ineptitude. The film opens with Huppert’s mousy, diminutive Marie Géquil (whose name marks the first of Madame...

Serge Bozon with Isabelle Huppert, his Mrs. Hyde Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Mrs. Hyde (Madame Hyde), screenplay by Serge Bozon and Axelle Ropert, cinematography by the director's sister Céline Bozon, stars Isabelle Huppert as Mrs .Géquil, the science teacher you don't remember. The students make endless fun of her. Malik (Adda Senani), who is being teased for a bad leg he had from birth, is particularly hostile.

José Garcia is her stay-at-home husband who cooks for her and is less perceptive than he seems. Romain Duris, the principal of the school where she teaches, wears pants and ties that match the colours of the school's walls and doors.

Serge Bozon on Delphine Caposella's look for the principal in ‪Mrs. Hyde (Madame Hyde)‬: "We tried to do something funny with Romain Duris, a kind of dandy but out of place." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

At Le Parker Meridien on West 57th Street,...

Mrs. Hyde Nyff Review Mrs. Hyde Review Mrs. Hyde (2017) Film Review from the 2017 New York Film Festival, a movie directed by Serge Bozon, starring Isabelle Huppert, José Garcia, Adda Senani and Romain Duris. Serge Bozon’s Mrs. Hyde is, overall, an unfocused mess of a film. Though it has its charms, from creative and often funny shot direction and [...]

Continue reading: Film Review: Mrs. Hyde: An Unclear & Messy Treatise On…? [Nyff 2017]...