Eyes Without a FacePeople are compelled to extreme, even insane, actions when their sense of identity is threatened. Eyes Without a Face is the story of a surgeon named Doctor Génessier (Pierre Brasseur), who runs a clinic in the rural suburbs outside Paris, and is skilled at facial reconstructive surgery. He lectures on the process of heterograft surgery--facial replacement--but struggles to complete a successful transplant. His motives to achieve this triumph are heightened, however, as his daughter, Christiane (Edith Scob), is now bereft of a face, and he is compelled to overcome this obstacle in secret.
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Eyes Without a Face is a horror movie, although due to censorship constraints as it was being produced, the kind of overt elements insinuated in the plot and other graphic details are rare or absent altogether. The film is largely bloodless, and visuals of graphic detail--from the faceless Christiane, to the unfortunate ends of Génessier's victims--are restrained or even merely implied. The ironic result of this censorship is that Eyes Without a Face becomes a thriller of more psychological proportions, and the themes of pride and vanity--of parental domination also--become more evident in the plot. In Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice", it is said that "vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.” The same ideas of pride and vanity hold true for Eyes Without a Face, although they apply more to Génessier and, to an extent, his secretary, Louise (Alida Valli), than to Christiane. Christiane is certainly despondent and morose following the undisclosed incident which left her without a face--her pride plays on her sense of identity here. A grandiose portrait of Christiane, which hangs in the opulent mansion on the same campus as Génessier's clinic, suggests that Christiane was very pretty. Even when she has her face transplant, although she should look more like her "donor", she does not and is pleased with how she has healed. In part, Christine is complicit with the macabre experiments to recover her face, implying that her pride has overtaken her sense of right and wrong; however, it is Génessier who is the one who has molded her into a monster at all. Génessier is described by Christiane as controlling; this assessment is an understatement. Although one can appreciate the just what a monumental task transplanting a face would be, Génessier seems more interested in the achievement itself than the welfare of his daughter--what happened to Christiane's face must have posed a golden opportunity for him. The scenario means that he and Louise--herself a devoted servant to his work, being a successful recipient of his talents--are willing to forego morality in favor of satisfying his sense of vanity, his efforts to succeed. The fact that a few girls have to lose their faces in the process for his experiments hardly even seems to phase him, revealing he and Louise to be the true monsters of the picture, and not Christiane.
Eyes Without a Face is suspenseful from the start, including a lengthy scene where Louise secretly drives the first known victim to the river to be abandoned and later discovered, so that Génessier may falsely identify her as his daughter, and thus eliminate the police search for her. The truth of Génessier's conspiracy is intentionally concealed for the first fifteen minutes, although astute viewers will sense something wrong from the all too aloof doctor and the immediacy with which he claims his victim is Christiane. Génessier may not be liked on the whole, but he is respected by his peers, and looked upon with minimal to no suspicion by the police, because he is "respectable". This is the only justification I can make for a later incident where a pair of police detectives repeatedly bungle the investigation. When offered a clue by Christiane's fiancé, Jacques (François Guérin)--interpreted to imply that Génessier is involved in these missing person cases--the police do a fairly incompetent job in their reconnaissance and protection of the bait in their operation--a naive shoplifter named Paulette Mérodon (Béatrice Altariba)--and fail to thoroughly autopsy Simone Tessat--the girl who was identified as Christiane. Everyone falls for Génessier's portrayal of himself as a benevolent and respectable man, because his vanity dictates that he presents himself this way. He appears to live luxuriously in his mansion, although he spends all his time in his basement laboratory. He takes in stray dogs under the auspices of a rescue effort, but instead keeps them in cold, metal cages and experiments on them for his skin graft processes. The process through which he and Louise engage in to trap young women as potential suppliers of facial tissue leads them to openly lie and deceive girls, like Edna Grüber (Juliette Mayniel), capturing them as predators would. Although it is clear that Génessier was an egomaniac from the start, over time he neglects to acknowledge the missteps in his behavior, assuming others won't notice in light of his reputation, even mistakenly meeting the police at night at his clinic, prepped for a clandestine surgery. It is ironic given the title of the film that Génessier rarely exhibits a degree of visible change in mood; he seems to be perpetually stern, as though his face were a mask itself, frozen like stone, concealing his true vanity from others like a sociopath.
Génessier's domination over Christiane is felt all throughout Eyes Without a Face, from the massive portrait to her effective imprisonment in her own home. Since Génessier has faked his daughter's death, he is free to keep her locked away, like one of his dogs, in a cage--albeit a gilded one. Even when the face transplant appears to be successful, and Christiane wonders about how she can tell Jacques, Génessier insists that he will resolve the dilemma, although we have no doubt he has no intention of doing so. His suggestion for her to travel under an alias is also his way of controlling her movements, her actions, and not undermining his carefully calculated scheme. The mask Christiane wears should be one to help her cope with the psychological trauma of such a harrowing experience, but is molded not only to resemble her face but one in a state of persistent placidity, as though by making her appear at ease it can diffuse any sense of real emotion or terror at the goings on around her. This is also done for the benefit of Génessier and Louise, as it relieves them of the burden of sympathizing with Christiane's suffering except on a superficial level, and even subconsciously lets them avoid the guilt which should accompany their abductions. Christiane begins to understand her father more and more through this ordeal--the kind of man he is--and is ironically forced to mask her emotions, in part because she wants to believe her father isn't the mad scientist he's revealing himself to be, but also because if he was willing to perform his gruesome surgeries on these girls, she can't be sure what he might do to her. More often than not, it is Louise who comes to check on Christiane, and her visits seem to suggest they are designed to keep her emotions in check by showing that Louise is a successful example of Génessier's work. When Christiane releases the caged animals from their prison, it is an exercise in freeing herself from her own captivity, both the literal one born from her false demise and the metaphorical one of her domineering father, the one long concealed within her subconscious.
Recommended for: Fans of a horror film which excels at inducing chills with largely bloodless moments of tense suspense and thought-provoking psychological tropes, those which vividly recall the definition of a "persona", or a mask, by Carl Jung.
Eyes Without a Face is suspenseful from the start, including a lengthy scene where Louise secretly drives the first known victim to the river to be abandoned and later discovered, so that Génessier may falsely identify her as his daughter, and thus eliminate the police search for her. The truth of Génessier's conspiracy is intentionally concealed for the first fifteen minutes, although astute viewers will sense something wrong from the all too aloof doctor and the immediacy with which he claims his victim is Christiane. Génessier may not be liked on the whole, but he is respected by his peers, and looked upon with minimal to no suspicion by the police, because he is "respectable". This is the only justification I can make for a later incident where a pair of police detectives repeatedly bungle the investigation. When offered a clue by Christiane's fiancé, Jacques (François Guérin)--interpreted to imply that Génessier is involved in these missing person cases--the police do a fairly incompetent job in their reconnaissance and protection of the bait in their operation--a naive shoplifter named Paulette Mérodon (Béatrice Altariba)--and fail to thoroughly autopsy Simone Tessat--the girl who was identified as Christiane. Everyone falls for Génessier's portrayal of himself as a benevolent and respectable man, because his vanity dictates that he presents himself this way. He appears to live luxuriously in his mansion, although he spends all his time in his basement laboratory. He takes in stray dogs under the auspices of a rescue effort, but instead keeps them in cold, metal cages and experiments on them for his skin graft processes. The process through which he and Louise engage in to trap young women as potential suppliers of facial tissue leads them to openly lie and deceive girls, like Edna Grüber (Juliette Mayniel), capturing them as predators would. Although it is clear that Génessier was an egomaniac from the start, over time he neglects to acknowledge the missteps in his behavior, assuming others won't notice in light of his reputation, even mistakenly meeting the police at night at his clinic, prepped for a clandestine surgery. It is ironic given the title of the film that Génessier rarely exhibits a degree of visible change in mood; he seems to be perpetually stern, as though his face were a mask itself, frozen like stone, concealing his true vanity from others like a sociopath.
Génessier's domination over Christiane is felt all throughout Eyes Without a Face, from the massive portrait to her effective imprisonment in her own home. Since Génessier has faked his daughter's death, he is free to keep her locked away, like one of his dogs, in a cage--albeit a gilded one. Even when the face transplant appears to be successful, and Christiane wonders about how she can tell Jacques, Génessier insists that he will resolve the dilemma, although we have no doubt he has no intention of doing so. His suggestion for her to travel under an alias is also his way of controlling her movements, her actions, and not undermining his carefully calculated scheme. The mask Christiane wears should be one to help her cope with the psychological trauma of such a harrowing experience, but is molded not only to resemble her face but one in a state of persistent placidity, as though by making her appear at ease it can diffuse any sense of real emotion or terror at the goings on around her. This is also done for the benefit of Génessier and Louise, as it relieves them of the burden of sympathizing with Christiane's suffering except on a superficial level, and even subconsciously lets them avoid the guilt which should accompany their abductions. Christiane begins to understand her father more and more through this ordeal--the kind of man he is--and is ironically forced to mask her emotions, in part because she wants to believe her father isn't the mad scientist he's revealing himself to be, but also because if he was willing to perform his gruesome surgeries on these girls, she can't be sure what he might do to her. More often than not, it is Louise who comes to check on Christiane, and her visits seem to suggest they are designed to keep her emotions in check by showing that Louise is a successful example of Génessier's work. When Christiane releases the caged animals from their prison, it is an exercise in freeing herself from her own captivity, both the literal one born from her false demise and the metaphorical one of her domineering father, the one long concealed within her subconscious.
Recommended for: Fans of a horror film which excels at inducing chills with largely bloodless moments of tense suspense and thought-provoking psychological tropes, those which vividly recall the definition of a "persona", or a mask, by Carl Jung.