or ‘Docteur Jekyll et les femmes’ or ‘Bloodbath of Doctor Jekyll’, Directed by Walerian Borowczyk, 1981, 90 minutes

As guests arrive to celebrate the engagement of Doctor Henry Jekyll (Udo Kier) and Miss Fanny Osbourne (Marina Pierro) they are unaware that Jekyll’s chemical experiments have created a violent alter-ego known as Edward Hyde (Gérard Zalcberg). When Hyde attacks the guests, Fanny must confront her lover’s divided personality.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” (1886) like Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ (1818) explores the social implications of scientific discovery. Stevenson reflects the pioneering work of Freud, Jung and others which would later develop into theoretical psychology and clinical psychotherapy. Like Shelley, Stevenson warns of the human consequences that entail when scientific research outstrips morality and challenges social convention. His life dogged by Illness, drugs featured prominently in Stevenson’s creative process; for the wealthier invalid the line between medicinal and recreational use of chemicals was often blurred. Stevenson was writing at a time when chemical products like detergent and patent medicine were changing domestic life (for better or worse) at all levels of industrialised society. The possibility of chemically adjusting human personality as a means of social control had already been recognised and would become a prominent theme in the literature of scientific speculation. The mutability of human psychology injects anxiety into relationships and challenges our fragile sense of self. Love and trust lose their lustre when we can change personality with a dose of powders. The enduring popularity of Stevenson’s tale attests to the potency of these fears.

When idiosyncratic Polish director Walerian Borowczyk turned his attention to Jekyll and Hyde his career seemed to be in decline. After the droll socio-political satire of his live-action début “Goto, Island of Love” (1969) Borowczyk’s work turned increasingly sexually explicit. ‘Immoral Tales’ (1974) and “The Beast” (1975) provoked censorious outrage and were dismissed by many critics as pretentious pornography. Stale and repetitive fare like “The Streetwalker” (1976)” and “Immoral Women” (1979) suggest that he found it difficult to rediscover the disarming sensual or intellectual delight of his earlier films. During the eighties and nineties his work slipped into cult obscurity. Seeing his work afresh is a reminder that despite the lingering, onanistic close-ups, and mannered fetishism Borowczyk can still bite. In “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Miss Osbourne” he offers a fresh perspective on Stevenson’s story and develops his own subversive social critique.

The film opens with an arresting recreation of one of the most shocking scenes from Stevenson’s tale. Borowczyk favours the bold colour palette of the Italian renaissance for many of his films but here he takes the visual tropes of gothic cinema and makes them his own. Shot in a drowned half-light a terrified young girl is pursued relentlessly through deserted streets. The girl’s face appears frozen for a moment, pressed against a grimy window like a doll trapped under ice. This startling image sets an hallucinogenic tone that is sustained throughout the film. In common with other animators who have turned to live action (particularly his famous fan and advocate Terry Gilliam) or the Brothers Quay, Borowczyk’s films are painstakingly choreographed. He places actors like puppets within static shots that often resemble staged tableaux. Borowczyk quickly moves the action out of the chaotic, nocturnal city streets and into the morning light of Jekyll’s spacious townhouse. These sequences pander to his love for seventeenth century Dutch realist painting: Vermeer’s “Woman in Blue Reading a Letter” (circa 1663) is a central motif in the film and Noël Véry’s cinematography captures domestic spaces where intimate shadows are interspersed by pellucid pools of light. As Fanny’s face is alternately etched in sunlight then occluded by bands of shadow as the camera lingers over her luminous skin, she is visually and metaphorically caught between light and dark. Borowczyk indulges his fascination for the play of liquids on flesh. Bathing is a frequent motif in his films, most memorably Báthori Erzsébet’s cosmetic bloodbath in “Immoral Tales” which reappears here as Jekyll immerses himself in his transformative elixir rather than simply drinking it. This perverse (and reverse) baptism takes place in an ornate bathtub. Always entranced by objects, Borowczyk’s background in surrealist animation gives him an animistic sensibility and he invests furniture, ornament and illustrations with their own secret life and symbolic resonance.

Borowczyk populates this enclosed world with a cast of stock types that represent the pillars of the establishment. These include a dotty priest (Clément Harari), a crusty general (Patrick Magee) who carries the faintest whiff of imperial atrocities and Doctor Lanyon (Howard Vernon) a character taken from Stevenson’s text who provides the rationalist foil to Jekyll’s more outré brand of science. Unfortunately, the process of introducing these characters is laboured and pedestrian. Distracting, mannered performances from Magee and Harari constantly threaten to break the languid, dream-like atmosphere. The debate at dinner attempts to establish motivation for Jekyll’s experiments but the leaden dialogue breaks the mood. Borowczyk is more eloquent when he uses props and design (for example in Jekyll’s laboratory) to establish social and historical context.

Once he has set up this microcosm of respectable society Borowczyk introduces his agent of chaos and watches as the veneer of politesse breaks down under Hyde’s relentless assault. Most adaptations interpret Hyde with bestial prosthetics but Gérard Zalcberg’s creature, with his sculpted hairline and severe bone structure is more subtly disturbing because of the understated make-up.  He resembles a sculptor’s maquette or an unfinished sketch, a more basic, linear humanity. Hyde’s bluntness and casual brutality are more shocking than the florid dialogue and melodramatic flourishes so synonymous with other interpretations of Hyde. Borowczyk gives full rein to his penchant for transgressive erotic imagery as Hyde runs riot in an orgy of murder and rape.

The film’s portrayal of violence is sometimes shockingly explicit: Hyde’s matricidal rage remains uncomfortable viewing even for those familiar with Sade’s views on family dynamics. Elsewhere the violence is more surreal, almost comic. For some inexplicable reason the general has provided poison arrows as an engagement gift allowing Hyde to indulge a penchant for hunting with bow and arrow. The film shares its sense of deadpan humour with other examples of surrealist cinema like “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (Luis Buñuel, 1972) or “La Grande Bouffe” (Marco Ferreri, 1973) where laughter at the unthinkable is a calculated affront to respectable taste. The transgressive style is complemented by Borowczyk’s enthusiastic portrayals of erotic fetish: The General’s daughter proves that a sewing machine really is a girl’s best friend; Hyde’s spectacular equipment is flourished with gratuitous glee at man and woman alike and the lingering, sodden transformation scenes are a masturbatory delirium.

Aside from the aesthetic delights of “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Miss Osbourne” there is also a sense that Borowczyk is trying to develop Stevenson’s themes. Borowczyk makes it clear that Jekyll’s formula is simply a key that unlocks the violence of the inner self by flashing forward from the niceties of the engagement party to the chaos that will follow. These jarring jump cuts demonstrate that extreme violence is latent within both sexes. Borowczyk emphasises this point when Fanny willingly embraces transformation alongside her lover, despite having already fallen prey to his violence. Other filmmakers have attempted to add a gendered twist to Stevenson’s tale: In Roy Ward Baker’s “Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde” (1971) Jekyll (Ralph Bates) transforms into the voluptuous Miss Hyde (Martine Beswick), suggesting that femininity is the dark flip side of masculine rationality; the oppressed working-class heroine of Stephen Frears’ “Mary Reilly” (1994) ultimately redeems Hyde’s corruption with her innocence and purity. Borowczyk is more ambitious: Fanny Osbourne is a strong protagonist, a woman who, unlike the heroine of his “Blanche” (1971) takes control of her destiny and escapes the strictures of social convention. In a neat touch Pierro’s character is named after Stevenson’s wife Frances who led a life which consistently challenged prevailing stereotypes of feminine behaviour, a woman who could shoot and roll her own, equally at home in the salon and the saloon.

Borowczyk’s response to Jekyll’s emancipation remains ambivalent. Viewers may accept the destruction of family ties and material culture as a necessary purgative, a prelude to spiritual liberation, but the refined and cultured Borowczyk seems particularly uncomfortable with book-burning and the liquidation of his beloved Vermeer. As the transformed protagonists flee into the night Bernard Parmegiani’s driving synthetic score pounds, harsh and grating to the ear, the structured beauty of the chamber music that accompanies “The Beast” or “Immoral Tales” replaced by something mechanical, monstrous. Jekyll and Osbourne have may exchanged the ennui of a bourgeois marriage for a new kind of control, a chemical romance of lust and violence.

With “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Miss Osbourne” Walerian Borowczyk recaptures the wit and style of his earlier work. Viewers who are unimpressed by his aesthetic and thematic obsessions are unlikely to be converted but anyone who enjoys his eccentric, distinctive cinema will welcome the return of this long-unavailable title to the screen.

Quotes

“…like a schoolboy throwing off the tawdry rags of his dreary institution, I throw off pretence and leap, wallowing in an ocean of freedom and pleasure.”  Dr. Henry Jekyll (Udo Kier)

Connections

Film and Television

‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ directed by John S. Robertson (1920)

‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ directed by Victor Fleming (1941)

(NB. This is merely a selection of film versions)

‘Goto, the Island of Love’ directed by Walerian Borowczyk (1969)

‘Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde’ directed by Roy Ward Baker (1971)

‘Blanche’ directed by Walerian Borowczyk (1972)

‘The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie’ directed by Luis Buñuel (1972)

‘Immoral Tales’ directed by Walerian Borowczyk (1974)

‘The Beast’ directed by Walerian Borowczyk (1975)

‘Mary Reilly’ directed by Stephen Frears (1996)

‘A Dangerous Method’ directed by David Cronenberg (2011)

Reading

Robert  Louis Stevenson, The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Alma Classics, 2014

Valerie Martin, Mary Reilly, Abacus, 2004