Synopsis: Professor Genessier's daughter, Christiane, has been hideously disfigured in an automobile accident for which he himself is responsible. To make amends, he attempts to reconstruct her face from women he abducts with his assistant, Louise. Genessier and Louise have lapsed deeply into obsession and they labor to cover their tracks and appear normal for all to see, all the while perpetrating crime after crime. Christiane, on the other hand, is deeply unhappy. She wants no part of her father's experiments, and drifts through his palatial house with a featureless mask over her face. Only her sad eyes are visible to the world. Eventually, she too snaps. Unable to endure even one more murder on her behalf and one more failed operation, she kills Louise with a scalpel and looses the dogs on her vivisectionist father, then wanders out into the night.
Performances: Both Pierre Brasseur and Alida Valli do superb work as our mad doctor and assistant. Valli, in particular, has a certain light of madness in her eyes throughout and the sight of her wandering the night in her leather raincoat to acquire and dispose of victims is striking. The film belongs, however, to Edith Scob as Christiane. We see her actual face briefly. The rest of her performance is given behind a creepy, featureless mask. She conveys her sadness with her eyes and her body language. The image of her drifting through her father's house and eating dinner as if nothing was wrong has a certain surreality to it. When, at the end of the movie, she drifts out into the night with a dove on her shoulder, the film crosses into myth. It's an image that could derive from a particularly dark fairy tale.
The Poetry of Gore: At the time this movie came out, there was a revolution going on in horror movies. The Hammer films in England and the films of Ricardo Freda and Mario Bava in Italy were redefining the limits of screen violence. The end product of this evolution would be the "gore" films of the sixties and seventies, particularly those made by the likes of Herschell Gordon Lewis, et al. Les Yeux Sans Visage was one of the films (along with Psycho) that transformed the violent horror movie into the "gore" movie. As such, it can lay claim, at least in part, to the genesis of the splatter movie. Unlike the films that came after it, though, Franju's film convinces the audience of the absolute necessity of it's gore. Franju was hardly gun shy when it came to filming violence. One of his previous films, Les Sang Des Betes (The Blood of the Beasts), was a documentary depicting the operation of slaughter houses in gruesome detail. The content in question in Les Yeux Sans Visage is the surgical footage depicting the removal of a victim's face, expertly faked and filmed with clinical dispassion and absolute clarity. It's a nauseating sequence that depicts the depths to which Genessier has sunk and the horror that weighs on the mind of Christiane. The film uses the image as a means of breaking into the mechanics of its characters' obsessions. Without the sequence, the film would be incomplete.
Les Yeux Sans Visage is often compared to Jean Cocteau. There is certainly a dreamlike quality to the film, especially its final sequences, that recall Beauty and The Beast. It also bears a certain resemblance to both Les Diabolique and Vertigo, both of which were based on novels by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, who worked on this film as screenwriters. Certainly all of three movies share a certain morbid fascination with death. Cocteau and Hitchcock is pretty heady company. That Les Yeux Sans Visage can stand up to the comparisons is a testament to the power of the film. It's one of the few films in the horror genre that transcends cheap sensation and makes the leap into the pantheon of cinematic art. A classic however you want to look at it.