Eyes Without a Face

Every time I go to the Landmark Cinema on Clark, I am riveted by a certain movie poster hanging near the ticket booth: a young woman lies unconscious in the foreground, while a masked face looms in the background, its eyes hauntingly and tragically gazing into the distance. The movie is Les Yeux Sans Visage, or Eyes Without a Face, and I finally saw it the other night.

While classified as horror, I found this movie to carry a certain poetry and grace unlike any other horror I have seen. Its soft sadness makes the really gruesome parts strange to watch. For those of us who remember the advent of live operations on TV, certain scenes in this movie wouldn't make us bat an eyelash; but in 1959 among European audiences, it was shockingly gross. The story follows a prominent surgeon who is consumed by the guilt of having caused a car accident that destroyed his once-beautiful daughter's face. He becomes determined to restore her beauty by experimenting with skin grafts. Aided by his slavishly loyal assistant, he lures young women to his home, chloroforms them, cuts off their faces, and dumps their bodies. Oops, did I say too much? It's okay: you realize all of that in the first few minutes.

Meanwhile, his daughter, Christiane, is a bird in a gilded cage. Her father has faked her death (so that the police won't suspect him in the rampant disappearance of young women all over town), she must endure one painful surgery after another, and worst of all: she misses her fiance, who thinks she's dead. Her only friends are the dogs in her father's kennel and his caged birds. Oh yeah, and she doesn't have a face. I really felt for this poor girl. Although played as a fragile, suicidal shell of a person, Christiane is not only a victim: she is ultimately her own heroine. In spite of one major hole in the climax (are the French police really that stupid, or am I missing something?), the movie is quite satisfying.