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DVD Eyes Without a Face - Criterion Collection
Georges Franju brings a haunting poetry to this lyrical and horrifying 1959 French classic. Dr. Genessier (Pierre Brasseur), a famed plastic surgeon, lures a young woman to his secluded mansion with the help of his mistress Louise (Alida Valli), where he proceeds to remove their faces in an attempt to restore his daughter's scarred visage. Christiane (Edith Scob), disfigured in car accident caused by her guilt-ridden father, hides behind a spooky blank mask that exposes only her sad, lonely eyes, which seem to lose a little more life after each failed graft. Franju's cool presentation gives an unsettling edge to the picture, from the uncomfortably quiet family dinners to Christiane's hesitant explorations of her father's laboratory to the unflinching views of Genessier's bloody operations. Reminiscent of Cocteau's fantasy imagery in Beauty and the Beast, Franju creates an eerie poetry of the doctor's sadistic experiments, culminating in an astonishingly brutal and beautiful finale. The screenplay was cowritten by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, authors of the novels which became Les Diaboliques and Vertigo. Originally titled Les Yeux Sans Visage upon its original French release, the film was cut, dubbed, and renamed The Horror Chamber of Doctor Faustus for American distribution in 1962, but was restored years later for American re-release. --Sean Axmaker
Review(s): DVD Eyes Without a Face - Criterion Collection
Haunting
Saturated as we are with images of violence and blood and horror, it may be hard for contemporary viewers to appreciate this extremely stylish, creepy little thriller. The story involves the standard horror tropes - young females in peril, mad doctor, gothic house in the country that hides untold terrors within - yet it transcends them through the serene beauty of its mise-en-scene, the austere black and white cinematography, the minimal use of music, the acting of it's principals, and most of all the presence of Edith Scob, the young woman without a face, wandering her father's mansion in a life-like yet deathly mask that reveals only her enormous haunted eyes. She is an odd prefiguring of Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby - frail, vulnerable, a victim of forces beyond her comprehension, a victim of her father's seemingly mad yet emotionally understandable desire to replace her disfigured face with a healthy face grafted from another young girl captured by his odd accomplice.
Which brings up the relevant topic of face-grafting, so recently in the news. What does it mean to have a face? Or to not have a face? Is not the face the personage we present to the world? Without a face, who are we?
I would highly recommend this to anyone looking for a thoughtful thriller. If you want a splatter film, a horror film, a fun thriller, you are definitely looking in the wrong place.
Not To Be Confused With The Billy Idol Song Of The Same Name. Billy Idol Sucks.
This French fear flick gets high marks from yours truly simply by virtue of the fact that A) Criterion has done a nice transfer and packaging job and B) It is one of the most poetic, serene, yet really monstrous old school films I have seen in a long time. If you like your horror to have a heart, and if you like to see the bad guy get what he really, really deserves, then this one might be right up your alley. More haunting than harrowing, it's not exactly a gore-feast...but there are a few stomach-churning moments, nonetheless. Also, the image of the heroine's rarely-seen mutilated face, trapped behind a creepy blank mask, is rather beautiful and terrible at the same time. Thrillseekers should probably seek elsewhere, as "Eyes Without A Face" is a little "arty' and dull in some places, but for a night of nice, sedate heebie-jeebies and dark imagery, give this one a shot. DVD also includes some interviews and junk, as well as a short, gross, and informative documentary on slaughterhouses, shot by the film's director.
Eyes Without a Face
A mad doctor - okay, the special features on the disk tell us specifically he's NOT mad, but c'mon now, this is mad doctor stuff if I've ever seen it - a mad doctor is responsible for an accident that caused his daughter to lose her face, save for her terribly expressive eyes. Her facial skin is lost down to the muscles and tendons, and her father schemes, with the help of a fresh corpse or two, to restore her face by grafting fresh skin over the damaged area.
EYES WITHOUT A FACE is a passable horror movie with a tremendous cachet and a somewhat mystifying reputation. It's more atmospheric than scary. The guilt driven Dr. Génessier, with the help of his beautiful assistant Louise, a former patient who wears a pearl choker to hide the scars, need new skin to repair daughter Christiane's ruined face. EWAF is a subtle shocker that sports a hurdy-gurdy soundtrack whenever Louise is trolling the streets of Paris for isolated and lonely young beauties for the demented doctor.
I try to make it a rule not to read other reviews before posting my own, but I haven't ignored the universally high ratings this movie enjoys or the fact that it's a Criterion (i.e., `quality') release. There's probably something big here that I'm missing. EWAF was okay, a solid three-star flick, until it fell apart in the last thirty minutes.
Fantastical stories - and a story about a doctor heterografting (that what he calls it) fresh, beautiful, living donor faces onto his daughter's ruined mug is pretty fantastic - have to be surrounded by the mundane and plausible. Without giving away any plot points or spoiling any surprises, through a series of suspiciously convenient coincidences the law becomes involved in the story in the third act. My breaking point came when a young girl turns up missing after a short stay in Génessier's clinic. The police's casual reaction to the news was the breaking point for me. It negated the very reason for the appearance of the police in the story in the first place, although it turned the suspense up on the final scenes.
As well as a number of short interview snippets with the director and writers, short tapes that span a great number of years, the dvd also contains director Georges Franju first film, a 20-minute black-and-white documentary from 1949 titled `Le Sang des bêtes', translated to English as `Blood of the Beasts'. The documentary is about the butchers of Paris, and its images of slaughter are extremely graphic. Graphic without exploitation, though - Franju simply documents the activities in a slaughterhouse circa 1949. It's very well done - the images are strong, often overpowering - and the camera acts almost as a neutral observer, seeing all. This is a good film, but I only recommend it with a strong warning about its content.
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