Les yeux sans visage

Georges Franju (1960)

The French appetite for la culture and la couture has an alchemical power here, transforming a crudely gripping horror scenario into a work of visual art.  (The film’s title on its original release in the US, in 1962, was The Horror Chamber of Dr Faustus.) The story – from a book by Jean Redon, who co-wrote the screenplay – belongs to the mad/megalomaniac scientist genre, in this case an admired and highly successful medic, Génessier.  The clinic he runs seems to cater for all-comers but reconstructive surgery is Génessier’s particular specialty.  We learn this from his first appearance, giving a public lecture on ‘heterografting’ – which moves into restoring-youthful-looks territory – to a largely elderly and understandably eager audience.  Back at his clinic, on the outskirts of Paris, Génessier is trying to reconstruct the face of his once beautiful daughter Christiane, whose facial tissue was destroyed in a car accident:  only her eyes remain.  His acolyte Louise, indebted to Génessier for restoring her face at some point in their backstory, prowls the Parisian streets on the lookout for pretty young women to lure to the clinic.  There they are drugged, put on the operating table and have their face removed for grafting onto Christiane’s – before the rest of them is disposed of by Louise.   Génessier also keeps for experimental purposes, in the bowels of the clinic, an assortment of large dogs, barking and yelping in their cages.

The tone and transience of human flesh are obviously at the heart of Les yeux sans visage and the visual scheme of the film (photographed by Eugen Schüfftan) is preoccupied with the texture of surfaces – the shining metalwork of cars, the women’s clothes (the gowns are by Givenchy), dark water – and with chiaroscuro effects.  When Christiane dons her mask and moves round the rooms of the clinic, the physical effect is extraordinary.  She’s a mannequin come to life but a sinuous, wraithlike mannequin.  On her first visit to the dogs, a Great Dane stands on his hind legs and Christiane puts her face close to his.  It’s like Beauty and the Beast but, with our knowing what’s beneath her mask, with the traditional roles both retained and reversed.

I know I’m no good at following plots but either I really did lose this one about twenty minutes from the end or it’s very clumsy (or possibly both).  The plot synopsis on Wikipedia may not be infallible either but it doesn’t say anything to suggest that the storytelling at this particular point is anything like as sophisticated as the filmmaking:

‘Inspector Parot asks a young woman named Paulette Mérodon to help investigate by checking herself into Génessier’s clinic. After being declared healthy, Paulette leaves for Paris and is promptly picked up by Louise, who delivers her to Dr Génessier’s secret lab.’

I couldn’t understand why Génessier, once he’d got a prospective victim like Paulette into the clinic, would so easily release her – then go to the trouble of having her picked up again.  (The way the pick-up is staged, it’s hard to tell whether Louise has been lying in wait for Paulette or if this is a chance encounter.)  I didn’t follow either why the police, knowing the risky situation they’d put Paulette in, were so careless about keeping an eye on her.

Franju nevertheless orchestrates very skilfully the beautiful, realistic and horrific elements in the material.  The conventionally horrific moments (the glimpse behind Christiane’s mask, the revenge of the dogs) are few but the deeply disturbing basis of the story and the realistic parts of the picture – and its mesmerising beauty – are such an arresting combination that you’re very soon, and remain, in suspense.   The operation to remove the face of one of the victims is clinically detailed and objective.  The scenes of normal life going on in the centre of Paris not far from the clinic become nearly as uncomfortable to watch as the events in the house of horrors, through simple juxtaposition with these.  You recognise Pierre Brasseur’s beautiful voice immediately as the camera moves from outside to inside the lecture theatre where Génessier is holding forth but Brasseur throughout the film keeps in check his theatrical flair.  He plays the doctor’s hideous obsession very straight and deprives you of the safe distance that you might have (and welcome) if Génessier were laughable.

Brasseur is so impressively believable that Alida Valli’s vivid creepiness as Louise is almost light relief, especially given the unsurprising sexual overtones of the role – which is conceived and played in traditional predatory lesbian terms.  Even so, Valli manages to produce something vocally and visually distinctive.  Her deep-voiced, heavily accented French stands out.  Its false quality goes with the face we know to be artificial;   a barricade of pearls conceals the surgical scar on her throat; her raincoat is superbly, seductively sinister.  The cast also includes Edith Scob (the ethereal Christiane), François Guérin (her fiancé and Génessier’s innocent colleague at the clinic), Béatrice Altariba (the young woman who narrowly escapes the face lift), Juliette Mayniel (one who’s not so lucky) and Alexandre Rignault (Inspector Parot).   The fine score – alternating a delicate, melancholy waltz (associated with Christiane) and a hideously jaunty merry-go-round melody – is by Maurice Jarre.

9 February 2009