Wild and raving film, in which the great Polish director Walerian Borowczyk takes the Jekyll and Hyde story and transforms it into a phantasmagorical trip into the stranger dimensions of our animal lusts.
The film begins as it means to go on, with a small girl child chased through the dark Victorian London streets and then violently attacked by an unidentified gentleman. The action then goes inside the house of radical scientist Henry Jekyll, where visitors are arriving to sign a condolence book (Jekyll's pater has died) and celebrate the engagement of Henry to Fanny. Fanny's mother has brought them a beautiful Vermeer painting as a present, and the two are obviously very into each other, so promises well. But the evildoer who killed the child is found in the house, and of course it's Henry's lunatic beast of an alter-ego, Edward Hyde.
Hyde rampages through the house, raping men and women to death with his enormous spiked dick. A puritanical army general tries to bring order to the chaos but ends up killing innocent bystanders before being tied up to witness his own daughter acquiesce willingly to the blandishments of Hyde. The general whips his daughter after in fury. Things go from bad to worse, from mad to madder as Fanny discovers Jekyll's secret and, rather than rejecting him for his sexual violence, bathes in the same transforming bath as he and throws herself into the carnal carnage.
The film rampages along at a violent pace, as Borowczyk throws all caution to the wind to show us a repressed world in the grip of a rising demon, "an individual with no morality." The characters sometimes get together for philosophical debate - carried out at a passionate fever pitch - as Jekyll challenges his rival Dr Lanyon's dry materialism. When in the mouth of Hyde, the argument for "transcendentalism" becomes full of boasting that he can be both respectable and know infinite, unbounded freedom combined with accusations to the rational: "you commit even great atrocities in your dreams." The attempt to divide the world and human nature into civilised and bestial has resulted in Jekyll's utterly riven nature, as he emphasises that "both of my faces are me!" The film's biggest innovation is Fanny's throwing herself enthusiastically into the wicked ways of Hyde. Borowczyk's feminism is, as usual, complete and radical - patriarchy is a prison for women and they must commit any crime possible to escape. At the end, with both Henry and Fanny transformed into monsters of blood lust, they have at least finally achieved an equality which the civilised world denied them, as we leave them "wallowing in an ocean of feeling and pleasure." Borowczyk's take on the tale is amoral to the core, and Hyde's salaciously described and occasionally glimpsed weapon is used to puncture in the most visceral way society's veneer of respectable morality. Hyde is never condemned, and the "moral" characters are mocked and satirised mercilessly; only a brief glimpse of a black servant girl mourning over the death of the Indian butler gives us a pause to question the rampage of Hyde.
With it's enveloping dark shadows, maniacal sexual beasts, stabbing pizzle and constant murmuring & throbbing electronic score, the film is finally not rational statement at all about human sexuality and civilisation; it is rather something far more terrifying, totalizing, tempting and challenging - an embodiment of a human being's wildest fantasies, a letting loose of all reigns, an admittance of the deepest and darkest of desires, when a man might look at his lover and say "my dream is to see your dead body" and find that this dream actually turns the lover on.
Udo Kier has wonderful moments as the shook-up Jekyll; Marina Pierro has never been more ravishing and striking; and Patrick Magee is at the zenith of his madness, and gets put through worse atrocities by Hyde than even Alex in A Clockwork Orange could provide. In Dr Jekyll et les Femmes, Borowczyk reaches his apotheosis with this film, and no one in cinema have ever gone further from a moralistic stance.
The film begins as it means to go on, with a small girl child chased through the dark Victorian London streets and then violently attacked by an unidentified gentleman. The action then goes inside the house of radical scientist Henry Jekyll, where visitors are arriving to sign a condolence book (Jekyll's pater has died) and celebrate the engagement of Henry to Fanny. Fanny's mother has brought them a beautiful Vermeer painting as a present, and the two are obviously very into each other, so promises well. But the evildoer who killed the child is found in the house, and of course it's Henry's lunatic beast of an alter-ego, Edward Hyde.
Hyde rampages through the house, raping men and women to death with his enormous spiked dick. A puritanical army general tries to bring order to the chaos but ends up killing innocent bystanders before being tied up to witness his own daughter acquiesce willingly to the blandishments of Hyde. The general whips his daughter after in fury. Things go from bad to worse, from mad to madder as Fanny discovers Jekyll's secret and, rather than rejecting him for his sexual violence, bathes in the same transforming bath as he and throws herself into the carnal carnage.
The film rampages along at a violent pace, as Borowczyk throws all caution to the wind to show us a repressed world in the grip of a rising demon, "an individual with no morality." The characters sometimes get together for philosophical debate - carried out at a passionate fever pitch - as Jekyll challenges his rival Dr Lanyon's dry materialism. When in the mouth of Hyde, the argument for "transcendentalism" becomes full of boasting that he can be both respectable and know infinite, unbounded freedom combined with accusations to the rational: "you commit even great atrocities in your dreams." The attempt to divide the world and human nature into civilised and bestial has resulted in Jekyll's utterly riven nature, as he emphasises that "both of my faces are me!" The film's biggest innovation is Fanny's throwing herself enthusiastically into the wicked ways of Hyde. Borowczyk's feminism is, as usual, complete and radical - patriarchy is a prison for women and they must commit any crime possible to escape. At the end, with both Henry and Fanny transformed into monsters of blood lust, they have at least finally achieved an equality which the civilised world denied them, as we leave them "wallowing in an ocean of feeling and pleasure." Borowczyk's take on the tale is amoral to the core, and Hyde's salaciously described and occasionally glimpsed weapon is used to puncture in the most visceral way society's veneer of respectable morality. Hyde is never condemned, and the "moral" characters are mocked and satirised mercilessly; only a brief glimpse of a black servant girl mourning over the death of the Indian butler gives us a pause to question the rampage of Hyde.
With it's enveloping dark shadows, maniacal sexual beasts, stabbing pizzle and constant murmuring & throbbing electronic score, the film is finally not rational statement at all about human sexuality and civilisation; it is rather something far more terrifying, totalizing, tempting and challenging - an embodiment of a human being's wildest fantasies, a letting loose of all reigns, an admittance of the deepest and darkest of desires, when a man might look at his lover and say "my dream is to see your dead body" and find that this dream actually turns the lover on.
Udo Kier has wonderful moments as the shook-up Jekyll; Marina Pierro has never been more ravishing and striking; and Patrick Magee is at the zenith of his madness, and gets put through worse atrocities by Hyde than even Alex in A Clockwork Orange could provide. In Dr Jekyll et les Femmes, Borowczyk reaches his apotheosis with this film, and no one in cinema have ever gone further from a moralistic stance.