Mrs Hyde (2017) NYFF 2017

Isabelle Huppert introduces Mrs Hyde at the New York FIlm Festival

Watching Mrs. Hyde I quickly realized that I really don’t like Serge Bozon's films. Running the short list of his films that I’ve seen I realized that I can admire what he’s reaching for but I don’t particularly care for what results. To me his films are too much of the head and not enough of the heart.

Mrs. Hyde has Isabelle Huppert playing a teacher in a technical high school who can’t reach or handle her kids. That all changes when she is zapped by electricity during a thunder storm and changes from mousey to self-assured.

While the film gets better the film never grabbed me at the start. Blame Bozon’s script which manages to subvert Huppert who is completely wrong for the mousey part of the role. Huppert is one of the most compelling actors working today holding the stage or screen despite anything else going on. She is one of the strongest people you’ll ever see on screen and seeing her play meek is a stretch. And while there is nothing wrong with her we never buy her character. Supposedly a 35 year veteran teacher you can’t believe that she would have ever gotten past a year. Her relationship with her husband is just WTF. Who is this guy and why is she married to him? None of it makes sense.

But Bozon doesn’t want sense he wants to make a point about reflections, changes and what we want or need or dream. For example he risks the audience’s attention by going into long discussions of mathematical theorems because the idea behind them somehow reflects the idea he is trying to put across. This is why we get twinned girls parroting each other’s speech and kids who are less people then ideas in human form.

I never connected. I simply sat in my seat and waited for something to happen to draw me into the action, or at least make some sort of intellectual sense. Nothing ever did, with the result the film was little more than watching someone move pieces around a chess board for some endgame of their own devising. While I knew what Bozon was reaching for I never cared enough to make sitting there for almost two hours worth it.

Mrs Hyde is a misfire that does the rare thing and wastes Isabelle Huppert.

Mrs Hyde has finished it’s NYFF run

Director Serge Bozon before the film at NYFF