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Director Georges Franju casts his seminal 1960 horror classic ‘Eyes without a Face’ in the fear of frailty. The fear that grips you when you accidentally bump into a rare Ming vase of extraordinary beauty and value, the string of images flashing through your head as the vase wobbles threatening any moment to be reduced to nothingness, to blank out a moment of history and beauty, the implications of a single moment of heedlessness. There is uncommon exquisiteness in every frame of the movie eschewing the shock value norms of horror but present throughout are lurking undercurrents of terrifying violence. Nothing good will ever come of it. The brittle and the delicate will shatter and bleed. The horror of it all…

The movie begins starts on an ambiguous note as the camera passes across unending rows of trees planted on the corners of the roads while a strangely innocuous tune plays in the background. Neither are the trees twisted gothic nor does the score inspire omens. Driving along the road is a sharp-featured middle-aged woman. Suddenly she tracks a pair of headlights in her rear view mirror. Her stone face breaks into a confusion of paranoia and fear. On the rear seat is a limp body of girl, her face obscured with a hat. This revelation is done without any discernable change in mood. No clash of cymbals, no acute angled close-ups. In fact, ever so matter-of-factly. The woman dumps the body into a river where it will be later discovered by the police.

The scene cuts to a doctor delivering a lecture on ‘heterografting’ which seems something like the face transplantation in ‘Face/Off’ which in the past few months has turned has been induction into scientific reality from fiction. At the end of the lecture the professor is summoned to the police station even as old high society Parisian hags congratulate professor on his discovery. It is a brilliant departure from the frothing monologues in which the hubris and vanity of the mad doctor who vies to play God is established. Director Franju makes it apparent on the sly that the hags view ‘heterografting’ as a fountain of youth while Doctor Genessier’s snubbing of them with an erudite play of words reveals himself to be a man of delusions pertaining to the ego.

He has been summoned by the police to identify the body which may or may not be of his daughter who it seems has vanished after being dreadfully scarred in the face in an accident. The body discovered by the police has had its face torn with surgical precision. In the manner of a jigsaw puzzle, Director Franju smoothly establishes the story central to the film. What could have been expressed in a series of schlock events in a ‘pulp’ genre, he patiently draws out with powerhouse narration. The doctor coldly identifies the body as his daughter’s and on his way out meets the distraught man who may in fact be the real father of the dead girl and tells him curtly,” It is a surprise that I have to be the be the one to offer consolation.”

After the burial of the body which is an electrifying sequence of morality in itself, the doctor and his assistant and maybe lover, Louise, the woman in the car at the beginning of the film, go home to their quiet suburban mansion far away from the lights of Paris surrounded by woods where people from the city come to dump their pet dogs to die after they turn too old. It is here that we first see Edna, the doctor’s daughter, her scarred face away to from our sights buried in a pillow. The doctor’s dangerous quest to perfect his discovery seems to be a misplaced attempt to reconcile with his daughter, himself and fate. After the doctor moves away from the room, Edna says to Louise, that it is her father’s rash driving, his ‘desire to control others, even on the road’ that led to the fateful crash. Edna it seems shares a closer relationship with Louise than with her father. Louise herself was once scarred before the doctor managed to graft her back to normal. In lines wrought with agony, Edna tells her mother-figure that even though all the mirrors in the house have been removed she can still see her hideous face. “Do you know how many object have surfaces that shine… edges of knives, varnished wood…”

Edna forms the crux of the movie. The frailty, the melancholy, the dread of the movie all come from her. She wears a mask of deathly pallor and stiffness to hide her scars. Only her eyes are seen, eyes weighed down by misery, eyes which are her curse as they remind her of her form. Director Franju uses the mask and the eyes to create a disconcerting yet poetic effect. When she asks to be set free from her misery, to be killed, her painful voice comes from within the mask which shows not a wrinkle of human expression. Only her eyes betray any emotion trapped in the immutable cage of the mask. Edna is the ghost of this horror story. There is a gravestone already with her name on it. When she wanders the empty corridors of the old manor, she is sad lonesome spirit seeking redemption. Franju directs her sequences poignantly, allowing for us to care while at the same time the horror behind the mask creeps and repels. We only get to see her unmasked once from the point of view of a hapless victim tied to the operating table while she caresses her face in hope and dread. As the victim once again lapses into unconsciousness wraith-like Edna drifts into a chamber where cages of dogs are kept by her father. The horror of the earlier scene once again creeps back into an undercurrent as one watches the hapless girl for once unshackled and loving with the caged beasts who reciprocate her care with nudges and licks.

Casting Juliette Mayniel as Edna was the most brilliant stroke of all. Frailer than Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby, her wide glazed eyes and waif mannerisms lend a phantom poetry to the scenes. Her muffled voice behind the inhuman mask aches as it speaks of pain and loneliness. When she calls out her lover’s name over the phone it as if the whisper has a spine-chilling tinge of coming from the beyond. As Louise, Alida Valli gives a performance of many hues and profound depth to cast a character in constant conflict- a cold blooded murderer, a trusting companion, a mother figure, a guilt-ridden criminal. Her scene at the graveyard where the doctor attempts to desecrate a grave is a furious confluence of her personas, a masterstroke of performance. Pierre Brasseur as the doctor remains aloof, clinical just as the character calls for and ends up etching a wholly original variation of the clichéd mad doctor. Eugen Shuftan‘s cinematography and Maurice Jarre‘s score are surprisingly at odds for a horror film. There are no moments of shock surprise administered through slanted shots or distorting music. The shadows normally deep and obscuring are surprisingly light. Even the editing is not timed for shocks rather it times for drama, for emotions. In ‘Eyes without a Face’ fear is far more than a jolt or some blood- it is the nature of humans that inspires it.

One unforgettable stand-out sequence in the film is the montage of Edna‘s reconstructed face slowly deteriorating into rot. One must note that Franju was among the co-founders of the Cinematheque Francaise which would later give rise to the French New Wave and in that context, the particular montage be viewed as one of the precursors to the revolution. It is an odd decision to resist narrative by employing the montage and of all, in a horror film but Franju unfolds the images slowly like a medical slide in slow motion and there is sadness but also foreboding in that we realize that the hunt for another victim will soon begin.

Franju reserves the generic mechanics of horror for the denouement. Your heart will thud at the spiraling violence and for the first time, the narrative loses control letting you drift uncontrollably towards terror. And off this shock the final image is born and Franju sign’s of his nightmarish parable of loneliness, beauty, vanity and science with a dream that is as warped as it is triumphant. A will o’the wisp of cinema, the phantom dream.

(poster by:- SOUNDTRACK COLLECTOR)