Screen Picks

Eyes Without a Face

by Sam Adams

Eyes Without a Face (Fri., March 25, 7 p.m.; Sat., March 26, 2 and 7 p.m., $6, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542) A bad dream you can't wake up from, Georges Franju's avant-gothic thriller thrives on the same morbid fascination as his abattoir doc Blood of the Beasts. The movie's signature shot is a simultaneous zoom-in/fade-out on the results of a gruesome surgical procedure, a rubbernecking compulsion that turns into a dead faint. The story, drawn from Jean Redon's novel, is pure pulp: A mad doctor, haunted by his complicity in the car crash that scarred his daughter's face, harvests the living to restore her beauty. But from its eerie beginning, where Alida Valli nervously adjusts her rear view mirror until she has a clear view of the corpse sitting fully clothed in her back seat, it's clear that Eyes Without a Face lurks on the outer edges of genre. It's more film horror than horror film.

As Franju says in an interview on Eyes' Criterion DVD (which also includes Blood of the Beasts), his producers enjoined him not to make Pierre Brasseur's Dr. Génessier a mad-scientist type. The year being 1959, the Germans were still touchy about such characters, and Eyes needed all the potential audience it could get. (Franju was also told to avoid blood for the French censors and animal cruelty for the British. Americans, apparently, just wanted crap: The film was cut, dubbed, and retitled The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus.) Fine with him, Franju says; better a normal-seeming doctor who behaves abominably than one whose outward madness telegraphs his evil intent. However cold-blooded, Génessier is as pitiable as he is deranged, a man of reason faced with a tragedy no science can repair.

Inspired by Jean Cocteau as much as Tod Browning or Jacques Tourneur, Eyes Without a Face is haunting, almost hyperreal. Each shot has an inevitable precision, the same sense of ineluctable fate that spins Vertigo, drawn from a novel by Eyes scribes Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, in circles. The remarkably fleshlike mask that shields the mad doctor's wounded daughter, Christiane (Edith Scob), from the world, is unnerving in its death-mask immobility, even more so when you realize it moves, ever so slightly, when Christiane speaks. Deprived of facial expressions, Scob moves with the stilted grace of a music-box ballerina, like Euridice wending her way out of Hades. Exiting in a storm of doves, Christiane narrowly escapes damnation herself; the audience, too, maybe feel they've been to hell and back. I-House's restored 35mm print promises frightening clarity.

The House Is Black ($29.95 DVD) Generally regarded as the most important female poet in Iran's history, Forough Farrokhzad directed only one short film before dying in a car crash at age 32. But like Jean Genet and Yukio Mishima, authors whose own cinematic contributions run under a half-hour, Farrokhzad's is an indelible one. Its surface is striking enough, composed of footage of a leper colony in Azerbaijan. But the film's dueling narrations — one authoritative, clinical and male, the other poetic, ruminative and female (the director's, in fact) — turn what would already be a haunting exploration of human deformity into an essay on ostracism and perception. (No wonder Chris Marker, who contributes an essay to the booklet, is a fan.) The transfer on Facets' DVD is unfortunately rough (a much better version is reportedly available from France), as are those of the two accompanying Mohsen Makhmalbaf shorts, but at least this elusive treasure is finally available.

Last Life in the Universe ($24.99 DVD) Pen-Ek Ratanaruang's deceptively light film is full of the emotional whipsawing that fans of Thai film have learned to love: one moment introverted librarian Kenji (Ichi the Killer's Asano Tadenobu) is arranging his books with comic anal-retentiveness; the next his Yakuza brother is murdered in their Bangkok living room. So it goes. Shot by Wong Kar-Wai cinematographer Christopher Doyle (as noted prominently on the DVD's cover), Last Life is loose-limbed to a fault, a disassociative jumble of blackout scenes that reflects the carefully controlled grief Kenji and the equally bereaved Noi (Sinitta Boonyasak) cannot seem to express. Cut loose from his homeland, Kenji moves into Noi's run-down house, filmed by Doyle with obvious affection, and he and Noi engage in a muted struggle for cross-cultural understanding (much of which plays out in strained English). That Ratanaruang is more interested in ambience than resolution is clear by the time Takashi Miike turns up in a flamboyant cameo as Kenji's brother's boss.

Like Chungking Express or Schizopolis, Last Life has the feel of a director bursting his chains (Ratanaruang's previous films include the bloody comedy 6ixtynin9 and the children's fantasy Mon-Rak Transistor), a sensation as exhilarating as it is disorienting. Palm's disc includes Doyle's reluctant commentary, but nothing is so revealing as the director's remark in his brief interview: "Chris likes liquor and women. I like women and pot."

Misc. Picks: It went M.I.A. last week, so Mahnaz Afzali's documentary The Ladies Room, recommended in last week's column, gets a replacement screening at International House (Thu., 8 p.m.). The Secret Cinema goes wandering with "Bon Voyage: Vintage Travel Films" at Moore College (Fri., 8 p.m.). ReelBlack screens the posturing graffiti thriller Bomb the System at the Sedgwick (Sat., 7 p.m.), while Scribe welcomes Yvonne Smith and her P-Funk documentary One Nation Under a Groove to Penn's Logan Hall (Mon., 7 p.m.). The Chestnut Hill Film Group closes its season with Beat the Devil, the unholy love child of John Huston and Truman Capote (Tue., 7:30 p.m.). Shellfish-related madness sweeps Patagonia in Andrés Wood's Loco Fever (I-House, Wed., 7 p.m.). Think of it as an appetizer for the Philadelphia Film Festival, which will screen Wood's Machuca on April 12.