More melodramatic than horrific?

More views of - or at (and before) - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)



8 September

Reactions to last night's special screening of Eyes Without A Face (1960) (screened because it is said to have informed Almodovar's latest, The Skin I Live In, whereas others whose comments I read had not had that unique benefit of seeing it on the type of screen on which it belongs - a real plus for Festival and other screenings):


I'm guessing that if you don't actually laugh at a film that isn't meant to be laughed at, but nonetheless snort from time to time and perhaps shake your head in disbelief (or inwardly sigh, or cringe) at what is being shown that it may not have worked (for you).

Well, it didn't for me, I'm afraid. From the start, Maurice Jarre may have been asked to conjure up a certain flavour with a tune that kept being used in connection with the latest victim, but, just as with what was depicted, it all seemed too whimsical. (That is with the exception of one sequence of scenes that - perhaps for no reason (see below, where I re-publish comments that I made on another web-site last night) - would have some in the audience averting or closing eyes of their own.)

In fact, still keeping that sequence apart, I was inescapably reminded of other features such as Thoroughly Modern Millie (not just because I delighted in Julie Andrews as a boy!) and all those adventures about Fu Manchu and his despicably beastly plots - OK, it's arguable that those films took from Eyes Without A Face and lightened the tone a little, and that I am reading that lightness back into the original, but I really don't think so. It really had the feel more of Arsenic and Old Lace, and of the others already mentioned, with the odd dose of chloroform knocking one person out for hours, and a sizeable thump over the head with a bottle having only a momentary effect.


But on to those other postings... (NB spoilers ahead!)

First, commenting on the graphic scenes, in response to someone who had liked 'the music, atmosphere, photography, the creepiness, the ending...', but not the detail of the police's undercover plot (which, true enough, had made no sense whatever), or the faked surgery:


'I thoroughly agree - just saw the film in a special cinema screening this evening.

'What I would go on to say is that, if you want to show something gruesome (and, yes, they defied expectations that the shot would cut away when what appears to be a scalpel appears to make an incision), it should look to the audience better than if you hadn't tried at all.

'Anyone who knows the fake knives with which actors regularly have their throats cut on stage wouldn't credit that this was remotely happening, whereas I (at least) still don't know how the infamous scene in Un Chien Andalou was done. After that moment, any notion that one is being presented with something shocking, rather than something that is meant to be shocking, has disappeared.'


Then on the character of Christiane (the daughter who has the eyes, but not the face to go with them), whom some had found 'enchanting', and 'beautiful in spirit', with her father being 'the real beast'. I expressed a contrary view (not, I hope, contrarily):


'I struggle to see how she is enchanting or any real moral contrast to her father (except facially, after she has been given another's face for at least the second time, and before that - skin-deep - beauty fades):

'We seem led, by her elaborately discovering where Edna is (it appears that she should not be there, and does not know anything about the operating-theatre, although she knows where the dogs are) and - not too intelligently or sensitively - flashing her deformed face at Edna just as she touches her and wakes her up, to the suggestion that she may not have know before how she has been operated on or what tissue has been used.

'That scene ends with Edna's scream (we don't know whether that is heard), and there is nothing to indicate what happens afterwards, but just that the surgery has still taken place (I believe that it is a scene of Edna in bed with bandages, leading to her escape and apparent jump (with, I think, another scream, though perhaps Christiane somehow doesn't hear it)).

'Whether, somehow, Christiane had not been complicit before, there can be no doubting now that she is fully aware that others are being maimed to benefit her. Even before that, she knows that some earlier victim's body (even if she does not know that she was a victim or the source of her facial graft) has been passed off as her own in burial.

'I do not find it convincing that she merely acquiesces in all this because of the strength of her father (her defiance in going off and finding Edna indicates otherwise), that she hides what she knows from herself because it is too awful to believe, or that her prying, as we are told, and finding her own death notice (or the order of service of her own funeral) really serves any useful purpose than confirming what the sharp-witted will already have surmised.

'Certainly, she moves as if she is some higher being, but she is no angel, and what she does by releasing the last victim (whatever will then happen to her), and letting the dogs and then doves out does not turn her into the carefree creature walking away from us with a bird on her finger that she appears.'


At any rate, my reactions to last night at 6.30 - really not sure, now, if I want to go through more of the same with Almodovar, not least as his Broken Embraces (2010) left me deeply unimpressed: again, I'm guessing that, if watching the film on DVD leaves you deriving more benefit from the deleted scenes (which, for my money, were far more inventive and funnier than the film itself - making one think that Pedro's own film must have been 'edited' in the way depicted in relation to the film within the film!), you were better off not going to the cinema to see it...