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Smile. Smile. Not too much: Review of
Eyes Without a Face
(Les Yeux sans Visage) (1959)by John Plunket
I’ll confess. I knew it as a Billy Idol song before I knew it as a film. A mournful song, with a chorus I couldn’t quite understand (les yeux sans visage? I thought it was a phrase in English, but it sounded like “Let’s use sand massage” to me, and that didn’t seem to make sense). Eventually, the film crossed my radar, praised without fail as director Georges Franju’s cinematic masterpiece.
.
First released in the US in 1962 as the dubbed, cut, and unfortunately titled The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus (in a double feature with The Manster), the film can now be seen in its original form on a Criterion Collection DVD.
Winter in France. Funereal scenes in black and white: car headlights on skeletal trees, a limp body being secretly conveyed to the frigid Seine, feet dragging along the ground.
A frigid man, Dr. Génessier (Pierre Brasseur), wracked with sorrow at the fate of his daughter Christiane (Edith Scob), who has been horribly disfigured in a car accident for which he bears the blame. A brilliant plastic surgeon, pioneer of the ‘heterograft’, a procedure for transplanting living tissue from one subject to another, Génessier is also an amoral criminal, using his technique on kidnapped victims in an attempt to restore Christiane’s beauty.
Brasseur makes an unconventional mad scientist, with his portly, owlish looks. He plays Génessier as a grim, methodical sociopath, his actions clinical and calm whether skillfully chloroforming a victim or disposing of a body in the family crypt. His mundanity makes him a believable, creepy villain.
Génessier’s nurse, Louise (Alida Valli) a grateful former patient whose scarred neck is hidden by a pearl choker, stalks and procures young girls to the music of a crazed, upbeat waltz by composer Maurice Jarre, luring them to Génessier’s isolated villa, a gloomy place echoing with the constant whine and bark of dogs, the Doctor’s more legitimate experimental subjects.
Christiane displays an emotional bond with the dogs - is it because they love her without revulsion despite her disfigurement, or is the attachment one of empathy? She, too, is an experimental subject of her father, trapped in the villa and subject to his will. Dressed in beautiful gowns, she sits in despair, wringing her hands, her haunting, pain-filled eyes staring from an expressionless mask like the face of a porcelain doll. At times, she summons the courage to phone her boyfriend Jacques (François Guérin), but can only listen to his voice, afraid to speak.
Christiane’s despair deepens as she reads her own obituary- Louise has set up the victim of the last unsuccessful heterograft to look like a suicide, and the police are easily convinced that the dead girl without a face is Christiane. Louise quickly acquires a new subject, Edna (Juliette Mayniel). Soon, Edna is strapped to an operating table in the villa’s basement, Christiane’s hands possessively caressing her face.
Now comes the film’s take-away scene. Génessier pencils in the path of the incision, and then excruciatingly removes Edna’s face, an operation shown in ugly detail. This graphic scene is made more successful by the way it sneaks up on the viewer. One knows what is coming, but assumes that the camera will pull away, perhaps to focus on Génessier’s face as he carries out the operation. But it doesn’t.
The operation is a success- or is it? Christiane is beautiful again, but she remains deeply troubled (“When I look in the mirror I seem to be looking at someone who looks like me, but seems to come from the Beyond.”). Celebration is premature. Christiane is given false hope, and in a series of wrenching mug shots we see the face graft fail. Spots and scars appear and spread, and her face breaks up like a burning film strip.
Although another victim (Béatrice Altariba) is soon snatched up, Christiane is overwhelmed by despair and longs for release. Will the police bring Génessier to justice before more women die? Or will Christiane’s madness spiral out of control?
Georges Franju described Eyes Without a Face as “an anguish film”, rather than a horror film. "It's a quieter mood than horror... It’s horror in homeopathic doses”. The film really defies categorization; this is not entirely a compliment. It almost seems to be two films awkwardly jammed together - the first, a melancholy, surreal meditation on disfigurement and guilt, with a few horror elements; the second, a crime thriller with a more bizarre premise than most. Indeed, screenwriters Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (in this case working from a novel by Jean Redon), wrote a string of crime novels, two of which formed the basis for Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Clouzot's Diabolique (1955). However, in Eyes Without a Face, the police elements feel like a distraction from the story rather than a part of it, serving little purpose and slowing the pace of the film.
In pieces, it is brilliant work: Christiane in her mask and beautiful gown, trapped in the villa like a caged bird, her lonely despair accompanied by Maurice Jarre’s gentle, sympathetic theme; the shock of the surgery and its aftermath; Génessier’s mundane sociopathy; his post-surgical injunction to “Smile. Not too much”; a haunting final scene; and the way so much in the film is left open to interpretation. However, it never forms a cohesive whole. Without a sustained undercurrent of horror or melancholy to carry it along, Eyes Without a Face is still well worth seeing, but it is only a masterpiece in fragments.
DVD extras on the Criterion disk include interviews, trailers, and behind the scenes photos. The most interesting inclusion is Blood of the Beasts (Le Sang des Betes), Franju’s 1949 documentary of Parisian slaughterhouses. With its footage of twitching, decapitated carcasses (veal, anyone?), it is much more disturbing than the main feature, but along with the rivers of gore, there is unexpectedly beautiful imagery. This extra alone adds to my rating of the film.
In addition to providing inspiration for Billy Idol, Eyes Without a Face spawned cult horrotica director Jess Franco’s The Awful Dr. Orloff (1962). Face transplants are now becoming a reality, as the 2005 case of France’s Isabelle Dinoire demonstrates, but using the faces of kidnapped young girls is still considered improper.
With superior being a bright full moon, this movie rates:
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© Plunket, 2006
