Les Yeux sans Visage (1959)
Les Yeux sans Visage (Eyes Without a Face)
Directed by: Georges Franju
Release: 1959
Cast: Pierre Brasseur, Edith Scob
More gothic gems~ Finally saw this legendary French arthouse horror classics Eyes Without a Face. The premise: a doctor’s beautiful daughter was disfigured in a car accident caused by himself. The title of the film refers to the iconic image of the blank, expressionless white mask wore by the disfigure daughter, whose pair of eyes shine through the holes of the mask. The guilt ridden doctor is determined to reconstruct his daughter’s face by kidnapping girls in Paris, then cut off their facial skins for skin grafting surgery.
While the doctor dwindling down to a Frankinstein nightmare, the humanity inside the daughter slowly disintegrated. At one point when her beauty was temporarily restored, the nurse remarked on her stunning beauty as ‘angelic’…an oddly ironic expression describing her new beautiful yet empty and inhuman face. Her mannequin-like prefect features, rigid movement and the blank stares was one sublime shivery moment. How ironic the pair of eyes showing throught the holes of the blank mask has more soul and emotions. Such contradictions was a running theme throughout the film…including the music, such as the daughter’s sweet childlike innocent theme music and the carnival-ish theme that’d played during the doctor’s deeds.
This story features two most quintessential girly horror elements: obsession with beauty and disfigurement
The film is a pure atmospheric, mesmerizing, ethereal and surrealistic beauty. A mundane scene of a car parking straight at a curve curb becomes poetry. The pacing is French Arthouse-slow (^^;;) but tantalizing, it is especially effective during the first surgical sequence. I know it’s 1950s’ makeup special effects, but the slow, real-time process of the doctor’s knife and scissors cutting the bloody facial skin off the victim was still shocking and revolting (too spoiled by PG-13 friendly ‘horror’ flick these days, I expected scenes like these would be treated as suggestive then fade to black ^^;;). It is film sadism; a lesser degree of torture was to witness the slow, tantalizing fall and inevitable demise of the tragic main characters (who were bounded by the love for each other and the consequences of bad choices). Though we were only teased by a blurry reveal of the disfigured face; her destroyed face would form only in audience’s imagination.
I also like how the ‘evil’ doctor and his assistent were calm, cool and collected people who loved and devoted to each other; they weren’t portrayed as twisted and psychotic monster as some moralistic storytelling rule goes for Hollywood. The redemptive ending was rather predictable as of today’s standard, but I like it nonetheless as it’s the ultimate contraditon: the disfigured girl freed everyone, including herself, from the nightmare through destruction. The story and imagery lingers on my mind afterward. As for the quintessential Gothic list: secluded mansion with dark secrets and dungeons, malady, mask, innocent girl in white lace pajama (designed by Givenchy! ^o^).
