Eyes Without a Face (1960)

aka: Les Yeux Sans Visage (France)

Directed by Georges Franju
Written by Jean Redon, Thomas Narcejac, Claude Sautet and Pierre Boileau

Unrated

I only saw "Eyes Without a Face" for the first time about a year ago. I was immediately struck by the artful cinematography and Hitchcockian plot. Since then I have seen it at least five times, and each viewing further affirms my appreciation for this film. In a fairly short time, "Eyes Without a Face" has become one of my favorite films ever.

The film opens with carnivalesque organ music and footage of trees rushing past outside a speeding automobile as the credits roll. Tree imagery will become very important within the film, and will represent nature in all of it's sublime, untamable glory. Automobiles, conversely, will represent crude technology as a metaphor for man's attempt to exercise control over nature. In several shots throughout the film, we see trees reflected off of Dr. Genessier's very shiny car. I saw the image of trees reflected on the hood of a car as a metaphor for the way that Genessier tries to artificially reproduce nature in his depraved medical experiments. Pay attention to the trees throughout the film, especially at the end.

When the "maniac forest driving" credits sequence ends, we see that the driver of the car is Louise (played by Alida Valli), a middle-aged woman in a wide pearl choker who looks paranoid and panicky as she drives. A peek in the backseat reveals why: a faceless corpse wrapped in a jacket. Louise  pulls over near a body of water and dumps the corpse. As far as movie "hooks" go, this one is pretty rich. Who is Louise? Who was the dead girl? How did she die and why is it being covered up?

In the next scene, we see Doctor Genessier, an esteemed transplant surgeon, speaking before a group of medical professionals. He claims that he has developed a fool-proof method for performing organ grafts and transplants that will eliminate the need for blood-type compatibility between the organ donor and recipient. His speech immediately reveals all you need to know about his character: he's cold, clinical, headstrong, determined, and is not afraid to play God in the realm of medical science. Several of the audience members discuss the rumors circulating regarding Christiane, Genessier's missing daughter, who disappeared after being horribly disfigured in a car crash while Genessier was driving.

The police find a girl with wounds that match Christiane's when she disappeared: face completely removed except for the eyes. One cop remarks that the wounds look too surgical for a car crash. Because Genessier's daughter is known to have been wounded and missing, he is called in to identify the body. Another man whose daughter recently went missing is called in to look at the body too, but Genessier goes first and assures the other father that the body belongs to Christiane, preventing him from looking to see for himself.

Upon returning to his large, foreboding house in the country, we discover that Louise is Dr. Genessier's housekeeper, and that his daughter Christiane is alive, living in hiding and wearing a creepy prosthetic mask to cover her disfigured face. I strongly believe that "Eyes Without a Face" was one of the sources of inspiration for "Arbre Los Ojos" (aka "Open Your Eyes"), the Spanish film that was remade as "Vanilla Sky". In these films, the main character is a rich and influential man who is horribly scarred in a car accident by a jilted lover and becomes a creepy masked recluse. While I am a fan of both films, neither the Spanish lead nor Tom Cruise wear the creepy mask as well as Edith Scob's Christiane.

Scob's Christiane is in a state of near-catatonic misery for the whole film. She's had her face torn off in an accident caused by her father driving like a maniac, and is then forced to hide herself away while her father holds a fake funeral for her. She is separated from her fiance, who thinks she's dead, and her only hope for a semi-normal life is her father's demented experimentation with skin grafting. Unfortunately for Christiane, her father's desire to recreate her face comes not from love or even guilt for causing her deformity, but out of a selfish desire to crack the mysteries of medical science. He keeps his daughter like a prisoner when he's not using her as a lab rat to test his latest ideas.

But Christiane is not the only person to suffer under her father's knife. Dr. Genessier has taken to kidnapping beautiful young women in order to steal their faces for Christiane's skin grafts. The body that Louise dumped at the beginning of the film turns out to have been an unwilling donor of a failed skin graft. Dr. Genessier promises Christiane that he's close to perfecting his technique, that soon she'll have a face again and be able to start a new life. Ironically, Christiane has been through so much pain that she would actually welcome death as an end to her suffering, but her father refuses to give up on her.

Genessier uses Louise to lure women to the doctor's house. She befriends them and tricks them into accompanying her to the mansion, where they are promptly drugged and their faces removed. Christiane has mixed feelings about her father victimizing girls in this way. She's hopeful that the experiments will pay off, resulting in a new beginning for herself, but is also painfully aware that for every girl Genessier kills, he takes only small steps towards a successful transplant. One of the faceless victims escapes only to commit suicide. At this point, Christiane starts sympathizing with the victims of her father's work, and decides that her life (or what's left of it) isn't worth the lives of others.

Because she can't resume her love life in any conventional way, Christiane has been making phone calls to her fiance Jacques and then hanging up without saying anything. Once, Christiane says his name into the phone, but is quickly cut off by Louise, who forbids her from contacting him again. This scene is actually enacted by the fictional theater troupe in "Ring 0: Birthday", the dramatic prequel to the Japanese Ring series. Sadako (who fans of the series will know is doomed to become a vengeful ghost) plays Christiane's part, and throughout the film, her acting troupe reenacts several scenes, most notably the "forbidden phone call" scene. "Ring 0" is a damned cool horror flick all by itself, but gets extra brownie points for referencing "Eyes Without a Face".

The phantom phone calls push Jacques to go to the police. A few sharp policemen have noticed a marked increase in the number of faceless women's bodies being found, as well as the fact that they all are proportionally similar to Genessier's daughter. When Jacques tells the police he suspects that his fiancee is still alive, they plan a sting operation to test Dr. Genessier. They find an attractive shoplifter named Paulette (played by silver-screen beauty Beatrice Altariba) to check into Genessier's clinic under the pretext of having migraine headaches.

Paulette is treated and discharged from the clinic without incident, but the police discover that after leaving the clinic, she never made it home. The police rush to Genessier's house. The bone-chilling finale is one of my favorite movie endings ever, and beautifully ties up the dark tale of the mad doctor and his faceless daughter.

I give "Eyes Without a Face" a 10/10, and that's only because it's the highest rating possible on my scale. Films like this tempt me to add a 10+ rating to denote truly spectacular films. I don't mean to gush, but this is one of the most beautifully-crafted, haunting horror films I have ever seen. It is nearly perfect in every way. The acting is top-notch, the story is worthy of Hitchcock, and the cinematography is just plain gorgeous. If you are even a passing fan of Hitchcockian suspense, you owe it to yourself to watch this film.













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