When his daughter is horribly disfigured in a car crash, a surgeon attempts to reconstruct the girl's face with skin grafts from young women he has kidnapped. He has had some success with similar experiments on stray dogs he has captured and stored in the basement of his secluded mansion in the wooded suburbs just outside Paris. He has even mended the face of his strange and lovely assistant (Alida Valli, best known as the cool brunette in The Third Man), who trolls the universities and lures the doctor's victims to his home. Every attempt to salvage his daughter's lost beauty fails. Her misery, guilt, and resulting madness lead to a tragic yet liberating demise of the doctor's house of pain.
That's grim subject matter for a picture that critics invariably describe as magical, beautiful, or poetic. Such descriptions are accurate, as Franju provides the ambiance and structure of the Gothic tale, while employing a pitch-perfect, disturbingly calm narrative and visual style to remind viewers that they are watching a different kind of grim fairy tale, or, as Jean Cocteau was fond of saying, a "beautiful nightmare." Recall the brief glimpse of a ghostly figure passing undetected through a corridor in The Innocents, or the indelible image of Norman Bates calmly standing in silhouette before the old house in Psycho, and you have some idea of Franju's restraint and elegance. It doesn't hurt that the screenplay was adapted by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, the duo responsible for Diabolique and Vertigo.
There is also a faint echo of the dream-like qualities of Jean Cocteau's Orpheus and Testament of Orpheus. Indeed, the influence by (and comparison to) Cocteau are part of the film's mystique now. Cocteau himself greatly admired it, often citing its photographic style as a lesson in maintaining what he enigmatically termed "the realism of fantasy." Even if he was a poet, he's onto something essential with that observation. Such realism, to the point of clinical matter-of-factness, is the hallmark of this amazing picture.
This is horror without histrionics, and events progress in a methodical manner only slightly less rigid than the doctor's surgical procedures. Maurice Jarre's haunting score (those chilly notes on the vibraphone accent the wintry setting) provides some carnival-like melodies that suggest madness and chaos, but more often the only sounds are the dogs' barks and howls echoing from the dark chamber beneath the house. The doctor displays a maddening arrogance and a stunning indifference to his victims' suffering. His daughter roams the house in a pale, expressionless mask; her satin gown almost glows, hiding her legs so that she seems to float along the corridors as she contemplates her father's awful obsession.
Eyes Without a Face received an American debut in an edited form in 1962 under the title of The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus as a double feature to accompany the film The Manster. In 2003, Eyes Without a Face was re-released in its original uncut form to American theatres to positive critical acclaimAt once ghastly lyrical, Eyes Without a Face is a true rarity of horror cinema and has influenced countless films.
08-22-2008
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