Post by StevePulaski on Mar 26, 2015 15:33:53 GMT -5
Eyes Without a Face (1960)
Directed by: Georges Franju
Rating: ★★★½
Directed by: Georges Franju
Rating: ★★★½
The opening of Eyes Without a Face (Les yeux sans visage) shows a young woman named Louise (Alida Valli), the assistant to the brilliant, renowned surgeon Dr. Génessier (Pierre Brasseur), dumping a body in the river, who Dr. Génessier later identifies as his daughter Christiane (Edith Scob). Christiane's face was horribly disfigured following a car accident, and following her funeral, we realize she is still living under the care of her father, with a plain, white mask over her face. Her father, who owns his own clinic right next door to their home, is trying to restore the beauty of Christiane's face by sending his assistant to find and befriend young, attractive women so that they can be kidnapped, taken to his clinic, and stripped of their own face to be surgically placed on Christiane's. One day, Louise finds Edna Grüber (Juliette Mayniel), an attractive, young Parisian woman who looks to be a perfect match for Christiane. Upon drugging her and taking her back to Génessier's home, the process of stripping Edna of her face and applying it to Christiane's begins in a horribly gruesome way.
From that premise alone, many potential viewers of Eyes Without a Face will be turned off and never look in the film's direction again. What they'll fail to see, however, is how remarkably beautiful of a film this is. Despite its grotesque premise, director Georges Franju keeps the film on a quiet scale, conducting everything in a softly poetic manner, relying on the essences provided by Eugen Schüfftan's black and white cinematography to carry the film. This atmosphere makes the film a decidedly artful venture, showcasing the lavish scenery and costume designs of those involved rather than making the film entirely about shock and awe.
Admittedly, there is gruesomeness to be found in Eyes Without a Face, and the level in which it's employed is pretty strong, especially given the time period in which it was made. Franju handles the gore in a way that makes the film more about the process than the actual shock; with such a frightening and depraved premise, one expects the film to be filled to the brim with completely nonsensical ugliness and gross-out schtick. Thankfully, the driving force behind the film knows how he wants everything to be executed, and that's not in the way of bargain basement shock. Franju creates an impact that's potentially everlasting on the viewer, creating a film that's equal parts carefully-executed French drama and classic American monster movie.
I liken Franju's film to an American monster film not only because of its atmosphere, but its buildup and execution. At only ninety-minutes, Eyes Without a Face is conservative in its narrative pacing and relatively slowburn in its structure. Franju hooks us early on by painting the picture of a clearly intelligent and thoughtful doctor, but one who is also not mentally stable. We then see Franju change gears to give his daughter's perspective on her treatment, living a now secret life confined to a white mask and her father's clinic, struggling to keep her own mental stability. Then we cut to Louise's manipulative, thankless task, and so on; Franju structures the film in layers, giving us suspense before providing us with an execution similar to a monster movie. We get a lot of tension before the instance we've been waiting for finally occurs, and through that, the same kind of emotions and feelings arise.
Eyes Without a Face comes at the pivotal time in French cinema when a new wave was underway. The longstanding "tradition of quality," where older directors made films for an older crowd, reiterating common values and traditionalist principles, was being demolished by younger, more radical directors who were motivated by watching a great deal of subversive films from all over the world and wanted to profile the kind of ideas they beared and they felt. These ideas were often politically-charged (a great deal of the 1960's work of Jean-Luc Godard), autobiographical works (several early works of François Truffaut), and films that simply broke every convention in French cinema at the time (specifically Godard's Breathless). Franju previously was a documentarian, making films concerning Paris industry, one about a slaughterhouse and another about the modernization of the city. Eyes Without a Face was his first film to deviate from his forte, and what amounted as a result was a great deal of critical indecisiveness about what kind of path Franju was attempting to forge with this new direction. Despite all of the criticism he received, Franju responded quaintly, saying the purpose was to give simple genre films like this some credibility, showing that they can break new ground and give us something to talk about just as much as any documentary could.
Eyes Without a Face is a masterclass of suspense and terror, and remains a revolutionary work of not only French horror, but French cinema in general.
Starring: Pierre Brasseur, Edith Scob, Alida Valli, and Juliette Mayniel. Directed by: Georges Franju.