Review of Eyes Without a Face (Les yeux sans visage)

            

           From french director Geroges Franju comes Les yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face), a deliciously bizarre about a renown French surgeon who is obsessed by the rejuvenating powers of plastic surgery.  

After a horrific car accident in which his daughter’s face was brutally disfigured--her muscles and ligaments now permanently exposed--he tries in vain to succeed in a procedure called a heterograft which consists of a successful transplant of living human flesh.  In order to do this he needs donors, regardless of whether or not they consent.  To complete this nefarious task he sends his assistant to prowl the streets of Paris to find a candidate whose beauty matches that of his beloved Christiane.  

Eyes Without a Face deals in extremely heavy doses of suspense.  We are painstakingly taken through the vetting process of finding a girl who is beautiful enough.   Once chosen, she is slowly stalked and eventually lured towards her gruesome and inescapable fate.  All this happens with the viewer being completely aware of what awaits the lovely candidate--clearly Franju has mastered Hitchcock’s notion of suspense.  

Along with those suspenseful elements the film also contains impressive make up effects considering the time period.  The heterograft is shown in clinical detail from incision to full on removal with little more than the clever use of a fine paint brush to substitute a scalpel’s incision.  Although I must say that for such a complicated procedure it really only consists of two steps: an incision that runs along the bone structure of the face and a clean face lift.  

So then what does Christiane make of all this carnage in her name? While she is obviously distraught by her mangled face she doesn’t seem to be reviled by it.  Her father on the other hand is a perfectionist and along with his assistant, they dismiss her trying to reach acceptance and insist that she wear a white mask that makes her look like a lifeless porcelain doll until the procedure is successful.  To her, the mask is more frightening than the carnage underneath it.  This however does not bother the father whose obsession with beauty, control, and perfectionism is well worth the price of his morality and even his daughter’s happiness.  

Overall the movie attains something very rare, it somehow strikes a balance between meticulously crafted suspense, terror, and the type of hyperbolic imagery that not only borders on camp, but sheer melodrama. 

-Recommendation courtesy of Ceci

Review of Mesrine: Killer Instinct (L'instinct du mort)

Before I start this review, I should mention that this film is part of a duology, but because only the first part is available on Netflix Instant and I need to write a review this will just have to do.           

          L’instinct du mort (Mesrine: Killer Instinct) is the story of world famous French criminal, Jacques Mesrine, here played terrifically by Vincent Cassel.  Mesrine skyrocketed to international fame thanks to his daring robberies and escapes, all of which seemed to be validated when a Montreal newspaper labeled him, “Public Enemy No. 1.”  Whether this means he is a great gangster or a horrible one is up for debate since true power in the criminal world is usually associated with anonymity and not how many times you can successfully get yourself incarcerated, but this is not a film about his tactfulness, its about his sheer bravado and reliance on violence as the ultimate cure all.

The film begins with the titular character as a soldier during France’s disastrous occupation in Algeria.  It is here where he learns of the immense, yet fleeting power that comes through the use of brutal violence.  Once his tour is over he returns to his wealthy and well-off parents in Paris who eagerly await his arrival and even get him a job.  Clearly Algeria is still fresh on his mind and he rejects his new life, citing his dad as a Nazi sympathizer and instead follows his friend into a life of crime.

There is a lot to enjoy in the film directed by Jean-Francois Richet: strong action sequences that highlight Mesrine’s “make it up as you go” approach to crime, a focus on his love life, which is very much handled the same way as his criminal enterprises i.e. horribly and violently; and most interestingly, a focus on French social factors that ultimately mold his persona--a Nazi occupation that is still fresh in people’s minds and a disastrous Libyan situation with more than a few racial implications.   

Unfortunately though a lot of this gets lost thanks to an episodic narrative that finds us in different stages of Mesrine’s life with little more information than the city name and year at the bottom of the screen.  This effectively makes the viewer loose track of what does work in the film and leaves the whole thing feeling disjointed and unaffecting.  Here’s to hoping that Part 2 succeeds where Part 1 failed.

-Review of Part 2 coming soon.