Eyes Without a Face Movie Review
French Horror/Sci-Fi Classic Predicted 21st Century Face Transplants
Dec 20, 2008
This atmospheric, moody mad scientist movie merits new attention now that the Cleveland Clinic has revealed a nearly full-face transplant was successfully performed there in the late fall of 2008 – three years after an earlier, partial transplant was achieved in, of all places, France, where this movie takes place.
The film’s premise is simple: famed plastic surgeon Dr. Genessier (Pierre Brasseur) is wracked by guilt over a car accident that disfigured his beloved daughter Christiane (Edith Scob). His plan to make things right is rooted in the macabre: he will replace his once-beautiful daughter’s face with someone else’s.
Alida Valli Co-stars
So, acting on Genessier’s behalf, the doctor’s devoted assistant and lover Louise (Alida Valli, best known as Orson Welles’ grieving lover in The Third Man) either kidnaps young women, or brings them to his countryside estate under false pretenses.
Each girl holds the promise of a new face, and life, for Christiane. And each surgery seems successful – until the transplanted skin shrivels and dies, rejected by Christine’s body chemistry.
In a film brimming with haunting images, few moments are more breathtaking than the ones featuring the ethereal Christiane, floating through the dim country house wearing a surreal mask that suggests the beauty she lost, becoming increasingly unhinged that others are being sacrificed in her name.
Edith Scob Steals Pic
Scob’s expressive eyes dramatically convey her character’s anguish. It’s a tribute to Scob – who made five films with director Georges Franju, Eyes Without a Face was the fourth – as an actress that she could be so effective despite the near-constant presence of a grotesquely serene mask.
The film is based on Jean Redon's novel Les yeux sans visage, and adapted by Pierre Boileau, Thomas Narcejac and Claude Sautet. (Boileau and Narcejac wrote the original Diabolique, and shared screenwriting credit, with two others, on Hitchcock's Vertigo.)
The surgical sequences are startlingly graphic for 1960, and, along with the general nature of the story, contributed to the huge controversy Eyes Without a Face generated on original release. (Critics generally panned Eyes, and it was years before Franju’s film was rediscovered and reappraised as a modern classic.)
Especially striking is the noir-influenced lighting by cinematographer Eugen Schufftan. It reinforces the horrors at the estate, and Maurice Jarre’s carny-influenced score adds the right touch of irony to a story that, like Carnival of Souls a few years later, feels distinctly like a nihilist’s nightmare.
Film Pre-Dates Face/Off
Eyes Without a Face is not the only film to depict face transplants. In 1997, director John Woo’s absurd action picture Face/Off had John Travolta and Nicolas Cage swapping faces every few minutes in an over-the-top spy caper story.
As recent events in France and Cleveland suggest, anti-rejection drugs eventually could make face transplants routine in the 21st century. Fifty years ago, director Georges Franju gave the world a prescient, cautionary tale grafting issues of identity, morality and ethics onto the face of a story both horrifying and gripping in its depiction of fatherly love gone awry.
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