Madame Hyde
“It’s a cry echoed by a thousand sentinels An order relayed by a thousand heralds A beacon flaring up a thousand citadels A call to hunters lost in the great woods...”
— Charles Baudelaire, “Les Phares” (1857)
“A woman of fire makes no sense.”
— Madame Hyde (Isabelle Huppert)
In addition to often being quite funny, Serge Bozon’s fifth feature and second consecutive Isabelle Huppert vehicle is an exemplary film about pedagogy, perhaps one of the great ones about intuition, and also one of the strangest screen interpretations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s seminal 1886 science-fiction/horror tale . The last is no small feat: at more than a hundred adaptations of the story made for film and television since the silent era, Jekyll/Hyde is the [2013]). And while a number of treatments of Stevenson’s story have productively subverted, among other things, its gender designations and core conceit—a wish-fulfillment fantasy in Jerry Lewis’ (1963), an anarchic explosion of blood and orgies in Walerian Borowczyk’s (1981), to name only a couple—Bozon and screenwriter Axelle Ropert’s treatment is less subversive than it is Cubist and glancing, resulting in a movie that crosshatches its various planes of ideas, templates, and discourses in order to simultaneously pay tribute to and move beyond certain systems of logic.
