The Depths of Pretension #2: Eyes Without A Face

Now here is a movie that I got introduced to just by the cover of it. And really, it is a pretty wonderful cover that kind of is the movie in a nutshell as it is the masked face of Christiane Genessier, who is the main driving force of what happens throughout the film itself, actions done by her father in order to make her life better. Eyes Without A Face also kind of got me intrigued as I was looking up the film in the Criterion site and was reading an article where Edgar Wright listed off his top 10 films in the collection and this movie was listed as number four. The way he talked about it was rather funny, as he was introduced to the film by his father who would tell his that the movie was the greatest horror film he ever saw, yet could not remember the name of the movie, which Wright himself would not be able to find out until many years later. The article itself is a fun read (http://www.criterion.com/explore/161-edgar-wright-s-top-10 if you are interested in it) and provided a great insight into one of my favorite directors and some of the movies he listed I'll probably cover very soon in a future article, those probably being Blow Out and Rushmore.

Now, getting back to the movie itself, the 1960 French film Eyes Without A Face is the story about a father who tries his hardest to fix his daughter's disfigured face caused by a car accident some time before. And his solution is to kidnap and kill young women, using their facial tissue in skin grafts for the treatment. Now in this light, the movie might be construed as a generic slasher film that shouldn't even be touching the likes of the Criterion Collection (which does have some baffling selections, like Armageddon) but really, the horror is underplayed, since as a whole there are only a handful of victims in the film, as in really only four, one of which had already died prior to the opening credits. A good portion of it focuses on the doctor's obsession with getting the procedure done right, having failed numerous times before as well as Christiane's disillusionment regarding getting a new face due to not only how the skin gets acquired but also because the grafts reject the new host (the scenes where they show the photos of the skin graft over time failing is one that I really could not praise enough with how well it works in ways I really cannot explain).

There are also a few moments in the film that do kind of get into the life Christiane had before the accident, where we are introduced to her former fiance Jacques during her fake funeral, going into how her father had her hidden since then and that the body they had buried was the victim from the beginning of the movie. The plot thread only comes in a few times where she calls him twice, only saying his name on the second call before hanging up. This does come into play towards the end but not really all that much. There is also the character of Louise, Dr Genessier's assistant in all of this, who mostly does it due to her feeling of owing him as she had gone through a similar process that Christiane is going through in that she was disfigured herself, which the doctor fixed aside from a few scars that are covered with a pearl choker. It is hard to say what the character of Louise stands for in the movie as she is in a situation that really does not seem like would really require her attention, and one wonders why she feels the need to aid the doctor in the killing and disposing of women, yet she does a good enough job at being a surrogate mother for Christiane which in of itself is good, as she often tries to give her support to keep going through with the skin grafts despite all the failures. The situation with Louise is one that I could also see being mirrored by Christiane if she was ever able to get a successful skin graft, as how she is technically dead and the only people who know she is alive are the doctor and his assistant, so she could probably get a new identity and live a somewhat normal life, as normal as having been isolated from the world for quite some time as well as having been part of a few kidnappings and murders can be.

One of the things that did kind of surprise me about this movie was that it was based on a book with the same name, which unfortunately I do not have that much information on at the moment, and that the tone of the book is rather different mainly due to the director having to try and get the censor boards off his back. Some of the things that did get removed were the amount of gore, which in the film is very minimal aside from a few scenes, the torture of animals which is implied in the film and the focus being more on the doctor in the book. The whole thing with the doctor was that due to German censors was for some reason upset with mad scientist characters (are a lot of stereotypical mad scientists German?) and putting more of a focus on Christiane would make the doctor more of a sympathetic character. And it does work to an extent, as it shows that despite all of the terrible things he does, it is out of the love for his daughter. Although, it has also left him blind to her growing apathy and disgust towards the whole thing and whether or not the procedure will ever work for her.

It is rather hard to rank this movie among it's peers at the time as I have not seen that many movies like this that were around then. The most generic comparison would be to compare it to the work of Alfred Hitchcock, which is kind of a easy one especially since the writing team of this movie did write the novelization of Vertigo. I also have a very little vocabulary when it comes to French film making as this is kind of my introduction to it and the only other movies that I have seen that have been French have been Blue is the Warmest Color and The Vanishing, which probably are not in the same category as Eyes Without A Face. Yet, I have to say that it has gotten me interested in it and has me hoping that I can find myself engrossed in those as I was in this film, as it is kind of a strange type of film, as it is kind of horror, suspense, and all that and yet none of those things. And there is always that eeriness of having someone whose face is covered in a white, expressionless mask and no clue is left as to what is underneath it.