(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 an accident. 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 Christiane 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 . 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
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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 fear of English 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.