Classic Films in Focus: EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1960)

Horror is a genre that encompasses many things. Although today's horror films tend to focus on the explicit nature of graphic violence, classic horror films often eschew such overt terrors for the subtler approach, suggesting that things unseen are far more terrible than anything we could actually be shown. Eyes without a Face (1960) is very much an example of this other kind of horror. The eyes of the title belong to a girl whose mutilated face is never clearly revealed to us, and the movie is much the better for it. This is not a gore fest, and it is not a film for the shallow adolescents who crowd the multiplex for the latest installment of torture porn. This is art, and it shows in every detail of this lyrical, haunting, and deeply disturbing film.

The plot hinges on face transplantation, a timely subject since today's headlines are full of the latest developments in that field. A famous surgeon (Pierre Brasseur) finds the perfect guinea pig for these transplants in his own daughter (Edith Scob), whose face has been destroyed in a car accident caused by the doctor himself. Aided by a maniacally devoted assistant (Alida Valli), the doctor abducts young women and grafts their faces onto the unfortunate Christiane in an attempt to make medical history and alleviate his own guilt over the accident. Christiane, however, proves an increasingly unwilling subject, in despair over her own disfigurement but more and more horrified by her father's demented attempts to cure it.

Prisons are the theme here. Christiane lives in the prison of her father's house, unable to be a part of the world outside, and she is further imprisoned by the smooth, lifeless mask that covers her ruined face. We see birds in cages, dogs locked up in dark kennels, victims strapped to operating tables, and all of them function as doubles of Christiane. The doctor himself is caught in a prison of guilt and obsession, while his assistant wears her tight pearl choker like a chain, hiding the scars that tie her to him just as she seems to try to hide her unrequited passion for him. Nobody is able to escape, until Christiane finally emerges from her chrysalis like an apocalyptic butterfly, floating through the final scenes to leave death and freedom (they are the same to her) in her wake.

Director Georges Franju enhances these elements through his brilliant use of sound. You could watch this film with your eyes closed and still know it was a masterpiece. The opening theme accompanies the assistant, Louise, as she stalks and disposes of the victims. It's like carousel music, full of menacing horror beneath its falsely cheerful lilt. Christiane's music is more like that of a jewelry box, one with a broken ballerina inside. Animal sounds punctuate key scenes, with the dogs in particular howling and barking like souls of the damned locked up in the doctor's secret underground rooms.

I should warn you that the operation scenes can be hard to watch, even though gore is not the movie's aim. The effects work for the removal of the victim's face is startling, even in black and white. You keep hoping that something will happen to stop this slow destruction of a human being, but it doesn't, and the process seems excruciatingly slow, even though the whole film only lasts about 90 minutes. Even in the age of excessively realistic medical dramas the scene has the power to repulse and disturb.

Ultimately, Eyes without a Face plays out like a more plausible version of Frankenstein, and it asks many of the same difficult questions that Mary Shelley's novel placed before readers almost two centuries ago. That story was also concerned with the failures of fathers, with Victor Frankenstein's willingness to create a monster and become one himself in pursuit of his desire to cheat nature. It is a warning that continues to be given to us because we are still not listening to it. Franju's beautiful film about ugly things is an excellent exploration of just these concerns. If you want a horror film that transcends its genre, this is the picture for you.

For more of Alida Valli, see The Third Man (1949) and the Italian horror classic, Suspiria (1977). You’ll find Pierre Brasseur in Children of Paradise (1945). Edith Scob, who is still working in 2012, has starred most recently in Holy Motors (2012). For more atmospheric French thrills, try Beauty and the Beast (1946) and Les Diaboliques (1954).

This review was originally published on Examiner.com. The author retains all rights to this content.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ending of LES DIABOLIQUES (1955)

Spoiler alert! This essay discusses the ending of the film at length. Viewers who want to be surprised by the ending should not read this post until after they have seen the movie for themselves.

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1955 French thriller, Les Diaboliques (also known as Diabolique), is famous for its twist ending, which the film’s promotional material begged viewers to keep secret in order to preserve the shock value for later audiences. Like the best surprise endings, the twist of Les Diaboliques hides in plain sight; it is both unexpected and inevitable. In fact, the clues about the movie’s ending are everywhere in the scenes that precede it, even in the title of the film itself. Aptly named “The Fiends” for its diabolical characters, Les Diaboliques presents us with two characters who rightly lay claim to such a title, while its third protagonist is persistently associated with angels and saints. Two of these characters belong together, but the film encourages the viewer to mistake which two in spite of its own strong hints about the truth.

The set-up misleads us by suggesting that the two women are the titular fiends for plotting the murder of the man both of them seem to hate. Nicole (Simone Signoret) is the smarter, tougher, and more ruthless of the pair, while Christina (Véra Clouzot) is the meeker follower. Nicole is the sexually transgressive mistress, while Christina is the legal wife, but Nicole seems far more determined to murder Michel (Paul Meurisse), which is immediately suspicious since Nicole does not act like the kind of woman who would take such a risk without getting some material good from it. Michel is a faithless brute, to be sure, but Christina balks at murder because her religious faith has already dissuaded her from getting a divorce. She only goes along with the plot at Nicole’s insistence, even though Michel has obviously abused her and openly hopes for her death.

In spite of her real abhorrence for Michel, Christina is no fiend, and nearly every scene in the movie places her firmly in the realm of the angels. Even her name associates her with her Christian faith. With her prayers and pigtails, she embodies the asexual purity of the virgin martyr; she even keeps an altar in her bedroom. Only once do we see Michel initiate a sexual encounter with Christina, and this scene plays out as a rape that cuts away as Christina pathetically protests. The camera shoots Christina in a way that complements our sense of her as victim and martyr, emphasizing her pale face and small size. These roles are established early on and are repeated as the various physicians foretell her death; she is slowly succumbing to heart failure even as the movie begins, and she becomes increasingly fragile as the narrative unfolds, especially after the disappearance of Michel’s corpse. 

As it turns out, the real fiends of the story are Nicole and Michel, who have concocted an incredibly complicated plot to kill Christina. By making Christina believe she has committed murder they intend to destroy her heart both literally and figuratively. Truly demonic in their cruelty and greed, Nicole and Michel refuse to wait patiently for Christina to die on her own, and they manipulate her in the most painful and vicious manner imaginable. They are, in short, a perfect couple, a pair of pitiless fiends. The only justification for their elaborate scheme - they could just jump out of a closet a few times and accomplish the same goal, and in Gaslight all it takes are some flickering lamps and a few missing items -  is their wicked delight in tormenting Christina spiritually as well as physically. 

Christina’s death at the end of the movie is thrown into some doubt when a young student at the boarding school says that he saw her and spoke to her, but this, too, supports our sense of her character as a religious martyr. Christina dies terrified by Michel’s apparent return from the grave, her heart finally exhausted by fear, but we know that death was inevitable for her, anyway. Michel has merely hastened the event. Michel and Nicole are caught and punished for their actions, which gives us a sense of justice in this world for Christina, but the anecdotal account of her return suggests spiritual justice, too. There is no reason to think that Christina is physically alive at the end of the movie – that would merely be a stay of execution for her, and nothing in the film implies that she stages her death as Michel had staged his. Instead, the story of her reappearance and kindness to the boy convey an idea of Christina’s soul being preserved; she is free now from her own ruined body and her antagonists’ cruelty. For a religious martyr, that’s as good an ending as one is going to get.

If you like Les Diaboliques, try other twisted thrillers like Gaslight (1944), The Spiral Staircase (1945), and, of course, Vertigo (1959), which also began as a story by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. For a better sense of the religious overtones of the film, try watching The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) first and then looking at Clouzot’s representation of Christina again.