Mrs. Géquil is a teacher despised by her colleagues and students. On a stormy night, she is struck by lightning and faints. When she wakes up, she feels different. Will she be able to keep the powerful and dangerous Mrs. Hyde contained?
In addition to often being quite funny, Serge Bozon's fifth feature and second consecutive Isabelle Huppert vehicle is an exemplary film about pedagogy...
Even though Mrs. Hyde loses the trees for the forest, any movie starring Huppert is radiant, and it should be evident that tossing in a special effect or a message will be superfluous.
As in Stevenson's story, the unleashing of Marie's latent furies inevitably veers toward horror, infusing Bozon's sociological satire with bitter ironies about the forces of order and the uses of disorder.
Whenever the movie tries to say something insightful about racial integration - or education, or any number of issues - it backs off or bogs down. It's so tonally and ideologically unfocused that its ideas just slip away.
Bozon...seems perversely committed to frustrating not just conventional audience expectations but also any hope whatsoever that one might have for narrative and/or thematic coherence.
There are problems with Mrs. Hyde that have nothing whatsoever to do with Bozon's puzzling creative choices, though for perspective's sake, the problems are dwarfed by the choices.