Isabelle Huppert as a clumsy teacher, Romain Duris as headmaster
[Google Translation / CULTUREBOX]
This crazy movie far from realism, is the opportunity for a new meeting between Isabelle Huppert and Serge Bozon. The star, awarded in 2017 by a Golden Globe and a César for her role in “Elle” Paul Verhoeven, had already shot under the direction of the director five years ago in the highly unclassifiable “Tip Top”, in which she embodied an inspector of police with Sandrine Kiberlain.
This crazy movie far from realism, is the opportunity for a new meeting between Isabelle Huppert and Serge Bozon. The star, awarded in 2017 by a Golden Globe and a César for her role in “Elle” Paul Verhoeven, had already shot under the direction of the director five years ago in the highly unclassifiable “Tip Top”, in which she embodied an inspector of police with Sandrine Kiberlain.
This time, the French actress is Madame Géquil, bad teacher unsure of her in a suburban high school to the colorful headmaster (Romain Duris), married to a homemaker (José Garcia). One day, struck down during an experiment in her laboratory, she will feel a new energy in her, which will allow her to finally transmit her knowledge to her students, and especially to one of them.
“A film about education and the transmission of knowledge”, according to Bozon
The idea of the film, which transposes Stevenson’s book into the feminine and into the world of school, was first born in the spirit of the co-writer of the film Axelle Ropert. “What seemed interesting to me was the film about education whose heroine is a teacher in check, and failed since the beginning of his career,” said Serge Bozon.
“We needed the fantastic to get it to something other than its eternal failure”, adds the director, for whom “the film is perhaps at the crossroads of different genres, but at the same time it is finally very focused on a only one question, that of education “and the transmission of knowledge.
The actress as we see it rarely, as a fearful woman
The 45-year-old director also said he found “interesting to look at Isabelle Huppert a dimension she had never explored”. “She usually plays strong, assertive characters, which goes with the question of authority, of violence.There is the opposite: she plays a very weak character at first, completely cowardly, fearful, who lives in the shadow of his permanent failure, “he analyzes.
The fantasy of the film, far from all realism and with stylized characters and outraged, also allows him to be “more frontal”, he analyzes. “The refusal of realism for me, it is what allows to go to the essential”.
Source: Isabelle Huppert, teacher transformed into “Madame Hyde”, inspired by Stevenson
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