France, Italy, 1960
Directed by Georges Franju
With Edith Scob (Christiane Génessier), Pierre Brasseur (Dr. Génessier), Alida Valli (Louise), François Guérin (Dr. Jacques Vernon), Alexandre Rignault (Police Lieutenant Parot)
A woman, worried and strained, drives by night on a countryside road somewhere in France to get rid, with much trouble, of a bizarrely clothed and bandaged dead body. A man, stern and angry, must go to a morgue to identify what seems to be his daughter, who has been missing for days. And then both stand together to attend her funeral, in a shocking development.
As soon it starts, the film looks a terrific crime story, anchored around a complex, tragic, horrible male-female relationship, shot in an effective, gripping way, whether it is that long drive into the night or the cold horror of a morgue (although some details, like the back projections, are rather cheap).
But when Dr. Génessier climbs the long stairs of his huge, swanky mansion to enter a nice bedroom to have a talk with a young woman so desperate she is unable to raise her head from her pillow, the illusion of a simple and ordinary crime plot vanishes. She is her daughter, Christiane Génessier, and what lies behind the dead body Dr. Génessier’s personal assistant Louise carried away with so much trouble is far more chilling and incredible than what the audience could have expected. The funeral’s purpose has been to hide away a shocking medical disaster, the outcome of a daring surgery aimed at transplanting the skin of the victim’s face to the disfigured face of Christiane Génessier, which is nothing than an open, bloody, ugly wound after the car his father drove crashed. The father is keen on getting his daughter her face back, whatever the cost, sure he can find the right technical solutions, with the strong and warm support of Louise, who benefited from the doctor’s surgical skills to repair her own facial skin. The daughter is far more doubtful and is getting sadder at the prospect of being locked down and then to travel away, once the surgery performed, only to convince the world she is really dead – and thus to keep his father’s mistake a secret.
Génessier’s obsession would be the narrative’s main thread and it becomes the chronicle of the relentless hunt of Louise to find out young women who could suit his grim goal and the maniacal effort of the doctor to perform surgeries supposed to help his daughter – which includes transplant operations on dogs used as guinea pigs. Louise andGénessier’s new attempt looks at first a success, but the victim, who this time has survived the ghastly surgery, runs away and eventually kills herself while Christiane’s new face gets infected.
A new prey is soon caught, but to the audience that means Génessier is in trouble and would be dealt with by the law: this other pretty young woman is a bait dangled by an old policeman who has been puzzled by the beginning’s dead body and who has tried to find the whereabouts of the girl who was the victim of the second attempt to transplant a face. What drove Police Lieutenant Parot to use a foolish girl arrested for shoplifting is the testimony of Dr. Jacques Vernon, who is the deputy director of Génessier’s clinic and was engaged with Christiane – he claims the speaker of a mysterious phone call he got had the same voice as Christiane and also, as the cop dismisses his opinion and explains he gets too many wrong or just vague statements when he investigates, drawing instances from his current cases, suggests that in fact some of these testimonies ring a bell.Génessier’s clinic becomes right away the place to watch.
This move of the police lieutenant injects more suspense, with the thrill of watching the bad guy playing with fire without realizing it and sets to get caught up red-handed, probably in the nick of the time for the poor girl. This is a perfect narrative trope of good crime stories. This would be fine to watch.
But this is not what happens – though the nice girl is saved and the mad doctor and his assistant punished. The narrative element changing the game proves to be the very girl whose lacking face spurred Génessier into an insane medical quest. This is probably where “Les yeux sans visage” is the most riveting: this mix of a thriller and a slasher becomes the poignant tale of a young woman setting herself free and embodying a poetic form of justice because of a physical pain she eventually associates with her father’s moral failure.
This is not just her mask. The elegant and precious nightgowns she wears and the poise and behaviors she takes turn Christiane into a powerfully eerie presence. As she tours the house, trying to understand what her father is doing and to relive better moments, both inquisitive and melancholic, she looks like a strange, well alive ghost keen on having a grasp on the locked-up life she is now forced to have and stirred by the loss of what she loved, especially the bright young doctor who engaged with her. The gracious, lilting music that is often played as she wanders, a magical and romantic score compose by Maurice Jarre, emphasizes strongly, indelibly, the uncanny nature the film has granted to Christiane, twisting the plot and the genres.
She is quick to denounce her father: after the first, stunning, scene presenting father and daughter together a second scene shows Christiane complaining to Louise, allowing the audience to get more information but also to find that she is painfully aware of how arrogant and stubborn he is, bluntly putting the car crash she was victim of down to his blind self-confidence. She acutely feels the gap between her and him cannot be filled. His sincere love and regret as well as his medical skills have held for a time a sway over her, even if she gathers he uses pretty horrible methods. But she builds a more critical attitude over the days, and feels more compassion and sorrow for the victims of Génessier, starting with the dogs, as long as more and more despair – hence her foolish phone call to her fiancé. And then she would act decisively, out of the blue, as she watches the cop’s informer twisting on the operating table. Her own moral standards now drive her to set the girl free, the dogs too, and also the doves that have been kept along the dogs in horrible rows of cages, and she would not even hesitate to kill Louise.
As the resentful dogs devour her father, she walks peacefully through the garden and the night, surrounded by doves, her mask on, her gestures more graceful and mesmerizing than ever. This is quite an amazing and fascinating final shot. Being without a face meant to remain a prisoner of her father’s perverted love and authority and to be deprived of a normal life but confronting horror and despair enabled Christiane to transcend her identity of victim and to turn her ghastly narrative into a symbolic, both nightmarish and dreamy, expression of love and justice getting incarnate and ending up triumphant. What a film, indeed.