(Caution—Spoilers near end.)
In 1959, a French director, known mostly for
documentaries, was offered the chance to make a horror movie.
He could make it as scary as he knew how…but with some major
restrictions. Tight limits on the amount of blood shown
onscreen. (Due to censorship in France.) The main
character could not be portrayed as a typical “mad scientist.”
(Censorship in Germany.) No cruelty to animals.
(Censorship in England.)
Some excellent writers worked on the story, but did
not come up with much that was truly original. Still, the
director, Georges Franju, had a vision as to what he wanted.
He came up with a cult favorite, with images you won’t
forget—a bizarre mix of hideous and poetically beautiful. It
showed real guts on Franju’s part—only a handful of people had
ever attempted to combine such extremes before. And keep in
mind, this movie came out before the freedom given to filmmakers
by
Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch, and Night of the Living Dead.
To make things even more challenging, Franju wanted
his characters to be as ordinary as possible. Not larger
than life figures like Dr. Frankenstein, Count Dracula, Hannibal
Lecter. How could anyone combine all these different
elements in one movie?
Making the murderers feel like ordinary
people was probably the easiest part. The more movies, TV
shows, nonfiction books and articles we read about serial killers,
the easier it is to accept Dr. Genessier and his associate Louise
as “average people.” By now all of us have heard about
people working nine to five, living day-to-day, even boring
existences, but with double-lives. Killing whenever they
can.
Dr. Genessier was driving with his daughter when
their car crashed, destroying her face. But the doctor is
convinced he has the knowledge and skill to remove the faces of
young women, and then transplant these onto Christiane. Make
her beautiful again, as she was.
This is where
Eyes Without a Face begins. Louise, a woman
completely devoted to the doctor, is dumping a woman’s body in the
countryside. The woman’s face is gone, used unsuccessfully
to graft onto Christiane’s. Meanwhile, Christiane had been
reported missing four months previously.
Dr. Genessier and Louise are prepared to go on
kidnapping, operating, and dumping bodies until they succeed.
So far none of the bodies have been found, but the doctor
has a plan in case one turns up. He will look at the body
and identify it as Christiane’s.
This time, Genessier needs to play that card.
The doctor’s fame as a surgeon and a skin graft researcher
gives him power. When the real victim’s father shows up and
wants to look at the body (after Dr. Genessier has already
identified it as Christiane), the authorities tell him he cannot.
Louise has the job of finding the women, and
bringing them to the doctor’s estate in the outskirts of Paris.
She knows what she’s doing. Find a young woman, new to
the city and act friendly and helpful without coming on too
strong. Louise has the right balance; I’ve been around, I
know what you’re going through, I know what Paris is like for a
newcomer.
You probably have seen some variation of this story
in a recent movie, or on the TV show
Criminal Minds. The brutal facts of real
life.
But the movie takes a strange turn, giving a
much different feel, when you meet Christiane. The doctor
needs to walk a long way, through strange doorways and up narrow
staircases to the room where his daughter stays hidden.
All that distance–not a coincidence.
Christiane lies on a couch, face completely hidden.
Something about her makes you think of an angel with a curse
placed on her, maybe of a princess from a fairy-tale, under a
spell.
Not that you could never picture her before in
everyday Paris, getting caught in the rain for example, having to
stand on a crowded bus or someone accidentally spilling coffee on
her dress. But that world is cut off from her now.
Dr. Genessier is over-protective, self-righteous,
controlling. He tells her he is this way because he loves
her. He is angry because she has taken off her mask.
Christiane never blames her father for the accident.
But she hates how “he needs to control everything.”
The doctor leaves. Christiane waits awhile then walks
through the huge house. In her featureless mask, there is a
beauty to her; long graceful body and limbs, hair combed
perfectly. In one room, she stops to look at her portrait.
The style of painting is tacky, even corny. Far from a
great piece of art.
Yet looking at it, you still feel a tragic irony,
because of what Christiane has become. She walks into a room
full of caged dogs. Each of them doomed, certain to be used
in her father’s experiments. She stops to kiss each
one.
Christiane’s inner beauty
But Christiane is more than dreamy images; she
is a real person. The movie won’t let you forget that.
Christiane knows that her father is not just a controlling
man; he may well love his research as much as he loves her.
Later on, she suggests that he is ambivalent about her
surgery. He wants her beautiful again, but if this operation
fails, he will get more chances to experiment, to get more
firsthand experience with grafting.
Lonely prisoner
Her fiancé, Jacques, works with her father, but he
is more than a clone of Dr. Genessier. You don’t see any
signs that Jacques idolizes him, or that Christiane wishes that
Jacques did.
The movie is unclear about how much surgery
Christiane has already seen her father perform on women Louise
kidnapped. But this time she sees the latest victim,
sleeping.
Again the movie’s style changes radically. You
are forced to watch, in graphic detail, a woman’s face literally
being detached. Slowly, with great care, Dr. Genessier makes
his incision, following lines he’s drawn earlier. Dangerous,
precision work. You see a few drops of blood trickling down;
somehow it feels more painful to watch the trickle than a steady
flow of blood. The procedure takes a long while.
Finally, “Here we go,” Genessier says, literally lifting the
face free of the tissue beneath it. Imagine what it was like
seeing that in 1959.
For a precious few days Christiane is beautiful
again. But the doctor knows the warning signs, and at the
first hint, he tells Louise he has failed again. Christiane
is without her face once more.
A
precious few days of looking as she did once
Unmistakable signs the surgery is not a success
For the second time, she calls her fiancé and
he answers the phone. The first time, Christiane was satisfied to
wait in silence, to only hear his voice. This time she
speaks his name quietly, “Jacques.”
Jacques believes Christiane may be alive. The
police launch an investigation, including a sting operation using
a woman they caught shoplifting. They force her to check
into Genessier’s clinic; they wait to see if he will kidnap her.
SPOILERS
***********************************************************************************
Louise and Genessier take the bait. The woman
is someone they want: young, beautiful, blue eyes. When you
see her next, she is already in the operating room, strapped down.
But here is where the movie really delivers.
Before the police have a chance to act, you see the
princess, placed under a spell, transforming herself into someone
real. Someone who says, in effect, “Enough. This is
where the bullshit stops.”
Yet at the same time, her appearance is still
otherworldly, ethereal; an angel of vengeance but still an angel.
Slowly she raises her father’s scalpel, but as the
restrained woman screams in terror, Christiane cuts the straps,
freeing her. Louise suddenly walks in. One stab with
the scalpel deep into Louise’s throat. Louise has enough
time to ask “Why?” before she dies.
Christiane opens the dogs’ cages and each is
free. Not far away, cages full of white doves. She
frees them next. They swirl about Christiane; one seems to
actually hesitate, stop to kiss her on the lips. A single
dove stays quietly on her hand. Outside, she sees her father
dead, half his face torn away by the dog pack.
A bizarre mix of brutality and unexpected beauty
(Probably the one serious piece of damage from the censorship
Franju had to deal with. Franju definitely needed to show
Genessier’s past cruelty to the dogs for this scene to make sense.
But due to censorship the movie could only show him being
stern with them.)
Christiane keeps walking slowly into the night….
Not everyone will appreciate the sudden
changes in moods…in styles. I can imagine comments like
“discordant” and “jarring” and these are understandable. The
movie makes some fast gear-changes from a graphic operating room,
to surreal poetic images, to dreary black and white (daytime
Paris), to plain realistic police story, among its many styles,
its many moods.
But give Franju credit for making the movie he
wanted. He was forced to accept some serious limitations.
Yet he still came up with a unique vision.