Docteur Jekyll et les femmes [1981]

It's actually difficult to like Borowczyk's oft-told story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, but it does have a certain perverse fascination.Repressed Dr J. (Keir) invites his circle of bourgeois acquaintances around for an evening in celebration of his engagement to a prim debutante, and, after wallowing in a steaming bath of bright-red chemical, emerges as a murderous thug who runs riot through the house, raping, murdering, torturing, and generally flouting Victorian conventions. The director may stray even further from his art house origins, but he retains his fondness for pretty-pretty soft focus period images, and an unappetising, misanthropic sense of humour. The stuffy dialogue is more arch and affected than anything in The Draughtsman's Contract, and the melodrama is played so straight that one doesn't know whether or not to laugh when a character walks into a room to find Mr Hyde wrestling with a crippled old lady and declares "I'll thank you to stop that." Several of the more atrocious atrocities have been put back into this version.

First Published In: City Limits no.176 [15 - 21 February 1985] p.20 [UK]

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