At some point, I put the 1960 French horror film Eyes Without a Face onto my Hulu watchlist since TCM was airing it. Apparently, Hulu recorded it and I never really got around to seeing it. You know, until last Sunday. I’ve heard a good deal about it, so why not?
“Why not?” seems to be the reason I watch a whole lot of things, but many times these aren’t horror movies in another language that got themselves included with the Criterion Collection.
Brilliant surgeon Doctor Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) is giving a lecture on his research into a new form of skin transplants when he gets a phone call. The police have found the body that they assume is his missing daughter Christiane. She appears to have drown, but this comes after the audience sees a woman, Louise (Alida Valli), drop a body in the local river, a body whose face we never see. There’s good reason for that: the woman whose body the police found doesn’t have a face. Just a pair of eyes and everything else to identify her remains. Génessier does identify the woman as Christiane, but he doesn’t seem too broken up about it. Heck, another man called in to see if it was his own missing daughter seems more distraught that Génessier.
There’s a very good reason for that: Christiane Génessier (Édith Scob) is still alive. She was horribly disfigured in some sort of accident, something her father is responsible for, and she spends most of her days in Génessier’s giant mansion, wearing a mask most of the time, and Louise is Génessier’s assistant. Louise heads out and finds young women to bring back to the house where Génessier knocks them out, removes their faces, and then attempts to graft the new face over his daughter’s in order to fix his mistake. He’s been experimenting with skin transplants on a mass of caged-up dogs in the basement, and so far, he hasn’t been all that successful. As it is, Christiane is reaching a breaking point over her guilt in her unwitting role in all this and the many times her father’s attempts have failed. The film doesn’t really tell us how many women have ultimately died in Génessier’s experiments, but we do see one in the middle where the procedure seems to work (allowing Scob to show her face a bit in the movie), only for something to go wrong as it appears her body rejects the transplant. Confinement, isolation, and guilt are all eating away at Christiane while her father and Louise keep trying to fix her, not caring how many other young women might have to suffer as result of their ongoing experiments.
And those dogs don’t seem to be treated much better. You gotta treat dogs right. Otherwise, that whole experience might come back to haunt you.
As horror movies go, despite the premise, this wasn’t all that grisly. The audience gets to see an unmasked Christiane clearly in one scene, and there is a longish surgery scene showing Génessier removing a young woman’s face and even a glimpse of a faceless woman who mostly looks like they smeared the actress’s face with some barbecue sauce. The whole thing is in black and white, it’s 1960, and European censors did have some standards the movie does its best to meet without being too gory. It largely succeeds. The horror isn’t there so much for the victims–though they get to show horror at their situation–but to demonstrate Christiane’s deteriorating mental state. Perhaps a little too close to home for 2020 and the pandemic, what little we see of “normal” Christiane shows a vibrant young woman full of life, but most of the time, she’s silent, mournful, and if she isn’t outright crying, she’s silently musing on various doves and dogs, showing more kindness to these animals than anyone else in the house.
As such, when everything comes to its conclusion and Christiane finally gets out, she makes sure she isn’t the only one to escape. The film’s final image of a masked Christiane walking off into the night with a dove on her hand is a good one to show that everything that happened isn’t going to make things any easier for her, but at that moment, at least she has her freedom. And like the bird, she was just a delicate thing confined to a cage.
Why did it take me this long to see something this good?
Grade: A
0 Comments