The Chills #6: Release the hounds
Major spoiler alert: This is THE END OF THE MOVIE!
Taken me AGES to get to this one, but it’s a goody! Matthew McConkey says:
Another Francophile suggestion from me, but this time an ending rather than opening: The final scene of EYES WITHOUT A FACE.
Without having some other examples of Chills to refer to I might have missed the point a little, but the first thing I thought of was chills as in a “chiller film”. Then I re-read the words “beauty” and “otherness” in your description and realised I’d misinterpreted you. But to me horror + beauty + otherness = the end of Eyes Without A Face.
Franju pretty much was the champion in exploring that ambiguity by combining “horror chills” with “beauty chills” and the serenity of Christiane stopping to release the birds amid the carnage going on always manages to raise the hairs on my neck and send a shiver down my spine.
That’s a textbook example of The Chills right there. Georges Franju’s surgical romance played at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1959, where women screamed and strong men fainted. “Now I understand why Scotsmen wear skirts,” remarked the director.
Nevertheless Franju, who had previously investigated bloody slaughter in the poetic documentary LE SANG DES BETES, served up more bodily mutilation than audiences were used to seeing at the time, and in a manner that was both clinical and beautiful. Too methodically slow to really function as a thriller, the film defies categorisation, except that which Franju himself offered:
“It’s an anguish film. It’s a quieter mood than horror, something more subjacent, more internal, more penetrating. It’s horror in homeopathic doses.”
Hugely influential, the film kickstarted Jesus Franco’s career, with THE AWFUL DR. ORLOFF starting a series featuring Howard Vernon’s mad plastic surgeon, and other face transplant sagas like FACE / OFF following in due course.
I was even mixed up with one myself, a feature script written by my partner Fiona, MIRROR MIRROR, which attracted European Script Fund money but then never got made, partly I think because people couldn’t understand the principle that, like Franju’s classic, it was a fairy tale.
April 9, 2008 at 2:33 pm
What’s great about the end of Eyes Without a Faceis that it doesn’t seem to end at all. The story we’ve been following comes to a conclusion of sorts only to take off in a new entirely poetic direction. Where is Edith Scob going? Who knows?
April 9, 2008 at 6:33 pm
I think she should probably start a jazz combo. I can imagine her singing in some smoky dive. They’d LOVE that mask.
The problem is she doesn’t have a face. I know that sounds obvious… but her mutilated face was removed and the transplant was rejected. When I was researching our version I asked a friendly doctor what your situation would be with no face, and he said, “You’d be in quite a lot of trouble.”
But, given that it’s a fairy tale, we could just say that she’s the princess freed from the tower and leave it at that.
April 9, 2008 at 8:17 pm
I’ve always felt that the mask was her true face.
April 9, 2008 at 8:43 pm
Could be. She seems to accept it here, or at least she says a very clear NO to further surgical monkeying around.
April 9, 2008 at 11:37 pm
“I think she should probably start a jazz combo.”
Lambert, Hendricks and Scob!
April 10, 2008 at 8:56 am
It’s got a nice sound to it.
Wasn’t there a punk singer called Nash the Slash who performed with face swathed in bandages? Scob could outclass him.
April 10, 2008 at 7:38 pm
Watching LYSV is it truly is one of the most startling film experiences it is possible to have. The vast swathe of pearls that we come to realise hide the scars upon the neck of the Louise (played with great menace by Valli) are one of the finest metaphors in cinema. Can I recommend it in a double bill with Nattevagten by Ole Bornedal.
April 10, 2008 at 8:10 pm
Oh, I have a copy of that somewhere! I’ve only seen the remake but I’ve forgotten most of that, so it might be the right time to run the superior original.