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Georges Franju’s Les yeux sans visage
BY CHRIS FUJIWARA
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Les yeux sans visage/Eyes without a Face
Directed by Georges Franju. Written by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, based on a novel by Jean Redon. With Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, and Edith Scob. In French with English subtitles. A Rialto Pictures release (88 minutes). At the Kendall Square.
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The central scene of Les yeux sans visage, the 1959 Georges Franju classic now in reissue, shows the surgical removal of the face of a young woman. If this scene is still shocking today, after 45 years of horror-film imagery far more gruesome and elaborate, it’s because Franju’s intention is not primarily to shock. The scene disturbs not just because of the scalpels, scissors, and blood but because of the irreversibility and cruelty of the surgeon’s act, and because we know that the still-living patient, on whom the operation is being performed against her will, is going to wake up. The surgeon, the brilliant and renowned Professor Génessier (Pierre Brasseur), is no sadist; he’s a monster who seeks to restore the face of his daughter, Christiane (Edith Scob), who was disfigured in the crash of a car that Génessier was driving. A specialist in experimental skin grafts, Génessier believes that his only recourse is to steal the face from a living donor and put it on his daughter. He seems driven less by compassion for Christiane than by the need to justify himself. The cold fury that characterizes Franju’s film is directed against Génessier, and through him at male power and the need to dominate. "I love order," he tells his devoted assistant, Louise (Alida Valli), but the order he seeks to establish is paranoid and repressive. Shot in lustrous black and white by Eugen Shuftan, Les yeux sans visage is obsessed with skin and smooth surfaces: Louise’s slick black raincoat and black gloves, Génessier’s plastic surgical gloves, his shiny black car. At one point Christiane says that though her father has had all the mirrors in her room removed, she can still catch glimpses of herself in the reflective surfaces of objects. Franju keeps Christiane’s destroyed face hidden from the camera, usually behind a white mask. He shows what’s behind that mask only once, from the point of view of the doomed face donor (who’s strapped to the operating table): by photographing the face out of focus, Franju mutes its shock effect, making the image less a depiction of horror than a premonition of it. The sorrow of this bleak fairy tale is overwhelming. Franju and Shuftan create an inescapable mood of desolation, much of it surrounding the isolated Christiane. Presumed dead and denied contact with the world, she’s become a sort of art object (Franju and Scob imply that even Christiane sees herself as such). Scob’s performance is a set of precise details: her desperate eyes floating in the blankness of her mask; her birdlike wispiness; her high collar buttoned to the neck and raised stiff at the back; her arms frozen doll-like at her sides as she glides through the corridors and staircases of her father’s mansion. Christiane’s alienation finds its most painful expression in her mute phone calls to her fiancé. Her only companions are animals: the caged bird in her room, the dogs her father keeps caged in a kennel (adjoining his operating room, where, we presume, he uses them for his experiments). Visiting the kennel, she stops at each cage to caress its occupant; it’s one of the few acts of compassion seen in the film, and the more powerful for taking place in a prison so terrible. Besides the melancholy lyricism of the scenes with Christiane and the horror of the surgery scene, Les yeux sans visage incorporates more-conventional mystery-thriller elements. But Franju exaggerates the quaintness of these elements (as in the scenes of the police investigation, which might have been written in 1840) and gives them an odd sophistication and creepiness, as when Louise prowls Paris in search of poor female students to sacrifice to Génessier. In one indelible sequence, Louise drives her latest conquest from Paris into the country. The glistening road at dusk; the student’s growing apprehensiveness as she realizes that the vacant apartment she’s been offered is farther from the city than she’d been led to believe; the suggestion that Louise sympathizes with her victim — all the details of the scene combine in an eerie and inexorable movement. The scene exemplifies Franju’s achievement in Les yeux sans visage: a balance between cruelty and tenderness that has rarely been attempted in cinema.
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