Huppert can’t help but be anything but great, though, and she dances between these various genres adroitly. She doesn’t get the opportunity to be funny very often, and while her complex, dramatic work in recent films including “Elle,” “Things to Come” and “Happy End” has been riveting, it’s also a pleasure to see the various other sides of her formidable talent shine through. If only the material itself were as consistent.
Writer/director Serge Bozon’s film, based very loosely on the Robert Louis Stevenson classic “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” features Huppert as Madame Gequil, a timid physics teacher at a French technical high school. She’s hugely unpopular with students and fellow teachers alike. The kids mock her, disrespect her, talk back to her. She clearly cares deeply about getting through to them, though—you can see it in the body language of her tense, tiny frame as she struggles to establish order. It’s unusual to see Huppert play a role in which she’s not completely in command; here, she uses her expert technique to indicate her character’s fragility and tentative nature through her physicality.
While working on an experiment in her lab one afternoon, Madame Gequil gets zapped by lightning, and she’s still feeling out of sorts when she gets up and goes home afterward. Her husband (Jose Garcia) stares at her. The dogs bark at her. But in time she starts feeling great—running everywhere, making inappropriate outbursts, flirting brazenly with Monsieur Gequil and (most importantly) asserting her authority in the classroom.
“I’ve never had so much energy in my whole career!” she exclaims to the pompous, pretty-boy principal (Romain Duris), who calls to mind a Will Arnett character in that he’s simultaneously full of himself yet empty.
At this point, “Mrs. Hyde” starts to feel like an understated version of a zany ‘80s comedy like “Zapped!” or “Weird Science”—movies with characters who gain incredible new powers through experiments gone wrong, which they exploit for cheap thrills. About a third of the way through the film, Madame Gequil finds she can transform herself into pure light (rendered vaguely by blurry visual effects), which causes damage that’s both accidental and intentional.
Weirdly, though, Bozon doesn’t seem all that interested in discovering what this newfound strength does to bolster Madame Gequil’s sense of self. She never unleashes fully to explore pent-up urges and exact revenge on those who’ve wronged her over the years. Rather, she focuses on being a better teacher, specifically to a disabled teen named Malik (Adda Senani) who’s been especially insubordinate and cruel to her. (Bozon also seems to be making a statement about racial and economic disparities in France, but he only skims the surface of this fraught topic.)
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