In 'Mrs. Hyde,' Isabelle Huppert Is a Different Kind of Dr. Jekyll

To call a master performer “electric” is often de rigueur, but for Isabelle Huppert’s turn in Serge Bozon’s Mrs. Hyde, the term is downright literal. As Madame Géquil (à la "Jekyll"), a taunted high school physics instructor in the outskirts of Paris, Huppert channels pent-up indignation into lawless incalescence. In this reawakening of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, when lightning strikes Mme Géquil's lab, sparks fly. Suddenly, the timorous teach is filled with new life by day and vengeance by night.

But before such “heated” bouts of lunar comeuppance, Huppert takes the "clueless white lady" trope to hilarious extremes. Her disaffected students mock her at every turn, while the school’s administration—led by a Rivers Cuomo–lookalike headmaster (Romain Duris)—conflates her lack of command with a failure to endorse its self-congratulatory liberal values.

Premiering at the Locarno Film Festival—and opening at New York's Metrograph this Friday—the loopy farce at first feels a Gallic mashup of Robert Louis Stephenson and the mad-science flicks of the 1980s (Firestarter, Back to the Future, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids). But of a piece with Bozon’s offbeat oeuvre (La France, Tip-Top), Mrs. Hyde ultimately engages graver themes with surprising—if fickle—sincerity. “What’s the essential?” Mme Géquil asks Malik (Adda Senani), a student with a disability whom she takes under her flammable wing. “How to be happy” is his response. With nothing in common but a passion for science and shared alienation, their journey together proves the riskiest experiment of all.

In person, Huppert couldn’t be less like Géquil, radiating a confidence and volition cultivated over 120 films in a career spanning nearly half a century. We spoke with the actress at the Lincoln Center after a screening of Mrs. Hyde at the New York Film Festival in October.

VICE: At the start of the film, Madame Géquil tells her students, “Teachers are not meant to be liked, but to be understood.” Many of your protagonists over the years haven’t been so likable, yet long for a sense of understanding. Do you consciously gravitate toward these types of roles?
Isabelle Huppert: I don’t reflectively think about this when choosing roles, but I think, with almost any character, once you can understand them, you tend to like them. Once you understood their motivations, it doesn’t matter if they are sweet, smiling, or easily seductive. Most of the characters I play are those whom, at the end if not the beginning, you tend to like.

Cinema also allows you to blur the border between bad and good in terms of psychological behavior. It’s usually impossible to define someone as completely bad or completely good. The camera allows you a different approach to witnessing someone’s behavior and choices. I’ve tried to take advantage of this over the years—because that’s what cinema allows you to do. It’s much more arresting, much more exciting that way, bringing questions rather than answers.

I saw Madame Géquil as both a humorous character, pathetic in her lack of competence, but also as a tragic character.
Exactly. That’s how Serge viewed her—as both. Ozon’s films are more like tales; his universe is imaginary and weird, so you can’t take it realistically. As a result, you can take a character pretty much anywhere you want. Madame Géquil is sometimes very funny, as his universe can be quite burlesque. I like how his films are, to some extent, a comedy, but can become a tragedy, as you say. He makes comedies with a lot of depth, a lot of substance. Mrs. Hyde asks a lot about education, what it means to be a teacher and transmit knowledge. All this content is there, though in a kind of humorous fable.

That tension between tragedy and comedy is there in the relationship between Madame Géquil and Malik; she starts as his mentor but then becomes a figure of destruction. How did you interpret her fiery outbursts? She doesn’t decide to hurt people, but in the end she can’t help it.
Her transformation, for me, as an actress, had nothing to do with preparation. You never witness her going through a change. She is who she is, then suddenly she’s somebody else. But in a way this fits with people’s behavior in real life. How many times do we see a person a certain way, and then the next day, he’s a different person, with the person himself unaware of this change? In the film, Madame Géquil shows the double dimension of any human being—carrying the good and bad in herself, without necessarily being aware of the bond between the good and bad.

When Madame Hyde goes back to being Madame Géquil, she understands that she’s been through something, that she doesn’t really understand herself. There’s a whole dimension of herself that’s a mystery to her. She’s unaware of the superpowers she has.

Was it a challenge to play a character like who lacks natural authority? In the past, even if your characters are not immediately liked, they exhibit a type of power and respect.
For me, the challenge was not so much about being weak or fragile. It was more about building this strange character—strange way of dressing, strange hair…

Strange relationship with her husband…
[Laughs] Yes, everything about Madame Géquil is a bit weird, but she has to be believable. She goes to work in a strange white coat and seems like a person from another century, another world. But she still has to seem real. She can go from very funny to very naïve. But then gradually, as you said, we get into the tragedy of her character. Initially, when I read the script, I read it more as a comedy, but as Serge was editing the film, it gained in scale and depth.

With Madame Géquil’s final speech to her physics students, there’s a tension between an almost slapstick physical comedy and a deep despair. How did you see that scene?
When we were shooting it, we saw it as tragic. She appears as a fading figure. Will she die? Are the police going to come? She comes to the end of this phase of her life, and that’s the way it was written. It was a big deal for me to remember all the complicated lines about genes and the environment—as were the previous scenes in which I was giving lectures or writing on the board. It was hard for me to understand all the scientific language, what I was even saying!

You went from being a piano teacher in The Piano Teacher to a philosophy teacher in Things to Come to a physics teacher in Mrs. Hyde. And your mother was a teacher. Why do you think you are cast this way?
I don’t know. The science teacher is the most unlikely, because in life I’m so far from the rational universe! These roles are all different, of course, but they all have to do with the importance of transmitting knowledge.

There’s also something believably cerebral about you—passionate and intense on screen, but also credible as a source of authority and knowledge.
Absolutely. Being a teacher automatically casts a certain type of light on a woman. Even if she’s going through the most intimate and complicated problems personally, the first impression you have of her is as a knowledgeable person willing to share that knowledge. That’s certainly what drives Mrs. Hyde’s character, even more than other teacher characters I’ve portrayed. The center of her life is teaching. Plus, as they say, she’s teaching in a difficult environment. With Bozon’s films, the style can be completely unrealistic, but the background and context is highly political and socially relevant. I love the way he combines the two elements.

The film also subtly questions the role of learning and meritocracy in public education. Some characters see knowledge itself as dangerous, while of course for Madame Géquil it is everything.
We were shooting in the outskirts of Paris—in what we call the suburbs—in a neighborhood that many of us only read about in the newspapers, not a place we were used to going every day. It was a journey to get there. We were shooting at an actual high school, which was still running at the time. So everything you see was set in the middle of everyday life in the school.

From an American vantage, it’s important to see Paris in a more complicated light.
Bozon’s earlier film Tip-Top, that I was in, also reflects that reality—multiculturalism in our country is not always accepted. There’s a real division between urban and suburban in France.

In the end, Madame Géquil turns herself in when she realizes her destructive abilities. At the end of Elle, your character Michelle takes similar responsibility for sleeping with her best friend’s husband. A lot of your characters, even when victimized on screen, ultimately take accountability, no matter the situation. For many, you have come to represent a character that can be strong no matter what.
I have been lucky to have been given these types of roles over the years. But it is certainly my responsibility, no matter what, to turn my characters into what you are describing. I think it is an unconscious decision. I am given material, and I have a propensity to show how a victimized person can show strength. I am never particularly attracted to strong characters, per se, but rather to those who seem weak but in the end can reveal strength. And a lot has to do with their position within the film. If a character is essential, you must show her journey more completely than if the character exists in the shadow of a man. In most of the films I’ve done, the woman is central. So you pay closer attention to what they are and how they change.

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