7.6/10
97%
87%
90%
3.9/5
76%
I know some people are not fans of foreign language films but I don’t mind them, and I have to say I really enjoyed this one. As someone who studied French at school and worked for a French company for a bit (a long time ago mind you!), it was nice to flex my language muscles and realise I understood a lot more of the French language than I thought — although I did have the subtitles to help me!
Six months before the artistic car scene opening of Psycho, we have the opening sequence of Les yeux sans visage. We’re in a car with some almost carnival music playing in the background. It’s discordant, frightening and yet playful at the same time. And this tune will become the musical motif for this dastardly character as she gets up to no good.
The female driver looks harried as the rain beats down and she needs to wipe mist from the windscreen. Headlights in the rear view mirror loom ominously as the driver gets more and more stressed, until the following car passes and the driver can breathe a sigh of relief.
Pulling off the road, the driver yanks a passenger from the back seat — we saw them through the initial drive and they were slumped and flopping around as if they were asleep. But no, it’s worse than that. This is a dead woman and they’re dragged down a river bank and unceremoniously dumped into a river.
We then meet Doctor Génessier, he’s a pioneering surgeon giving an lecture about transplants. He thinks he’s on to something but his methods so far have lead to rejection meaning the recipient needs so much X-Ray coverage they get irradiated and need their whole body drained of blood. Nice!
The reason why the “good” doctor is so obsessed with transplants is that he was driving a car that crashed causing his daughter to be horribly disfigured — she literally has eyes but no face.
Forced to wear a mask and cut off from society, Christiane lives her life as a ghost while her father, Doctor Génessier, tries to find a way to fix his most horrible mistake.
The body dumped at the start of the film was also missing a face and Génessier identified it as his “missing” daughter even though he knows she was a victim of his failed face swap experiment.
Génessier has been experimenting on dogs to further his face transplant techniques and is then using that knowledge on women his assistant abducts, which explains the first scene of the film — with the added bonus the doctor can now get people off his back about his missing daughter.
Génessier’s seemingly successful after the second transplant attempt but after a short celebratory period, the facial transplant begins to wither and die leaving Christiane despondent and wanting to kill herself rather than live life behind a mask and this sends Génessier in a desparate search for a new donor.
As his daughter’s mental state unravels and Génessier gets tantalisingly closer to a method of repairing his Christiane’s face, what lengths will he go to in order to rectify his mistake? How many will pay the price for his medical mistakes, and will he be caught before more are put under his dastardly knife?
No Wonder The Transplant Went Manky
🎃Warning! Spoilers for Eyes Without A Face below🎭
Now I understand the suspension of disbelief and all that but, even for the 1960s there are a few things very wrong with this film.
The lack of medical hygiene is the one I would like to concentrate on as it’s most pertinent.
Génessier has an operating room in a basement under his house. Off of that room is a kennel with lots of dogs in it. There is no inner/outer door, no form of clean room, just straight passage from the operating theatre to where the dogs are kept.
Now I don’t know about you, but if you’ve been near a dog (or a cat, rabbit or any furry animal), you know their fur gets EVERYWHERE so maybe the reasons his face transplants are failing is because he’s so flipping insanitary and dog hair is coating Christiane’s muscley mucus tendoned bloody face so the transplant can’t stick properly?!
There’s also the fact that the victims get hit with something like chloroform once and are then just left unconscious for a couple of hours with no additional anaesthesia to be had. Bold choice if you ask me! Who’s to say they don’t wake up and start to wander around without continued anaesthesia? Maybe they went to pet a dog and got some of that fur on their skin where it will cause issues?
Masked But Not Hidden
In today’s modern way of viewing media we’re often handed the character’s thoughts and feelings on a silver platter. We’re no longer left to infer meaning in scenes — either by staging, lighting, costume etc. — we’re always explicitly told what they’re thinking through direct exposition and conversations.
With Eyes Without A Face, we don’t have Christiane’s face to convey meaning, for the majority of the film she’s hiding it in a pillow or behind a mask.
But even when masked, the eyes do a lot of the heavy lifting for that character showing her shame and disgust at her father’s work to fix her.
The mask itself if also a character. While it is a blank canvas, it also shows how not in control of her own life Christiane has been — it’s been drawn for her by her overbearing father, she literally relies on her father for her face, her façade, her outwardly presenting personality.
She’s literally a blank canvas waiting for him to paint her a new face, a new life and a new personality in whatever visage he deems it for her.
And you also have Christiane’s clothing. Everyone else is dressed in dark tones but she’s always in white indicating an angelic existence, and maybe a ghostly one — when she finally leaves her room and moves around the house the long floating design of her dress almost makes it feel like she’s gliding from room to room like a spirit rather than an real person grounded in reality.
A Worthy Comparison To Hitchcock But For The Language Barrier
We often cite Alfred Hitchcock as being the “master of suspense” but as this film precedes his release of Psycho by 6 months I have to wonder whether this is a chicken and the egg scenario.
The car scene in Eyes Without A Face is very reminiscent of the opening car scene in Psycho. Or should that be that the opening car scene of Psycho is very reminiscent of the opening scene in Eyes Without A Face?
There’s long been a history of people turning their noses up an foreign language films — this is now thankfully getting better in the era of streaming, even if more people are choosing dubbed versions over subtitled ones.
The director, Georges Franju, has made several films in a similar vein and I think I will certainly have to check them out as Eyes Without A Face was full of suspense, intrigue, great set design and direction although the actors were a bit stilted in parts.
What do you think about foreign language films? Avoid them like the plague? Only watch them if they’re dubbed or happy with subtitles so you can hear the actor’s nuanced performance?
And do you think this film inspired the 1997 epic John Travolta/Nicholas Cage film Face/Off? I think it might have done!
Let me know in the comments below.
Watch Eyes Without A Face if you think dogs should be kept out of surgical areas and the fact that the doors of a Citroën 2CV opening backwards is the work of the devil.
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