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• Technoguy said...

  Posted on May 30 2008 21:06 Eyes Without a Face is as precise as it’s title suggests.We are in a world of masks and false identities.We are in macabre,but realistic world where horror and the fantasical
  operate in ‘homeopathic doses’. Having to get around the censorship of Germany,France,England and Italy, Franju chillybut lyrical film becomes poetic in
  his escewal of Grand Guignol gestures and colour, weilding a mean scalpel. The
  music is both jaunty and by turns melancholic,carnivalesque and internal.Dr.
  Genessier is no mad scientist,he gives lectures about the future of transplanting
  to respectable audiences who acclaim his worth and genius and he is a plastic surgeon. However he loves his daughter and feels guilty because he has disfigured her face in a road accident and must make amends by getting his assistant,Louise(Valli)
  to pick up young student women of similar facial structure.Once back he drugs them and while they are unconscious he removes the skin off their face to transplant
  onto Christiane, his daughter. Meanwhile she mopes behind a white porcelaine-like
  rubber mask,shut away from the world. Like a creepy fairy-tale princess awaiting
  release.She is the dominant centre of the film seeming to call forth desperate
  measures from her father,whereas he is the active centre.There is a ghastly cost to all
  this:the disposing of dead bodies in rivers or underground vaults.by his loyal
  robotic assistant-lover, Louise. Also, after a few days the transplants are rejected and the graft rots. The same cycle is repeated again. The pivotal centre of the film is
  when Genessier starts to sketch out on a guinea-pig’s face with a pencil then
  using his scalpel proceeds to cut along the pencilled line with blood coming out
  all the way along.His sweaty face conveys the tension of the scene and in graphic detail he lifts off the facial skin.Another major scene is where the drug wears off
  as Genessier has had to leave to speak to the police and Christiane wanders in
  without her mask and stands over the waking female.The look of horror on her
  face recalls when Mia Farrow wakes up in Rosemary’s Baby and realizes she has given birth to the devil. The climactic scene is where Christiane, once mutely
  compliant , now rebels and liberates a would-be victim. She also releases all
  the caged dogs who are experimented on and the doves with one on her arm
  walking outside into the woods without a mask, her father having been savaged to death,after having stabbed an uncomprehending Louise in the kneck.What is truly
  horrible is the way Franju deconstructs the horror by underplaying it. We never see
  beneath the mask clearly,only an unfocussed shot, thus intensifying the power.
  Boileau-Narcejas adapted Redon’s thriller.They famous already for Diabolique
  and Vertigo.Alida Valli(Louise) is well known from The Third Man.

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