Eyes Without a Face (1960)

Foreign-language films are an interesting type of film to discuss. They're either a miss because they're either too profound or artistic to register a warranted watching by the average moviegoer, or they express a universal theme that anyone from anywhere can understand and have a say about. One of the more intriguing films that I've seen within the past year, Georges Franju's eerie masterpiece Eyes Without a Face takes a gruesome concept akin to Eli Roth style torture horrors (Cabin Fever, Hostel) and weaves a poetic tale that leaves you questioning the morality of the themes and concepts expressed within it.

The film tells the story of a surgeon and his daughter Christiane, who, prior to the events of the film, was involved in a car crash with her father that left him uninjured, however completely disfiguring her face in the process. After feeling much guilt from the ordeal as he blames himself for the entire thing, the good doctor has his assistant go out into Paris, find young women around his daughter's age, kidnap them, and bring them back to his house where he surgically removes their faces to graft onto his daughter's. However Christiane begins to feel guilty for the problems caused by her father's deeds, as the women who he kidnaps end up killing themselves after their faces have been removed, their faces soon rejecting themselves from Christiane's tissue, and forcing him to go out and find more candidates. I won't spoil anything big, but the police begin to get suspicious of the disappearances and start to investigate, ethics are brought into question about doing good for someone if it ends up hurting another, and someone gets mauled by a pack of dogs. Yeah, I know it sounds a bit hectic and melodramatic, but the movie actually has a bit of a slow pace and realistic acting, which helps to bring the plot to life and make it believable. It's allure keeps you watching and wanting to know what will happen next, and will not leave you disappointed with its gratifying ending.

The movie takes a note from many noir films with its shadowy backgrounds and low lit corridors, but it isn't afraid to do other things. It can be very gruesome and unpleasant with stark operating rooms, cold, dark cemeteries, and kennels full of barking dogs which can be heard in the background throughout the course of the film. The whole thing also has a very ghostly air about it as well, especially in the scenes where Christiane is wandering through her house while wearing her mask, the only visible part of her face being her eyes, what the title of the film is referring to. She looks very much like an apparition as she strides around in her long dress, looking around with an unchanging expression, not saying a word. The movie relies a lot on this imagery though to get its point across, as many of the images are symbolic for the characters and their personalities. Most movies that have imagery like this usually don't convey them in a tangible enough way for most people, myself included, to understand what they represent. Eyes Without a Face however manages to get the point across about what means what without being too vague and yet not shoving it in your face. I like how it does this with its subtle hints and nods, and you'll realize what certain things meant by the end of the film, even if you weren't looking out for them.

Eyes Without a Face conveys the deep, yet simplistic idea of "is it still a good deed if I do something good for one person, yet at the expense of another?". Although sounding straightforward, the question requires much more thought to answer than it takes to say, and the film gives you good reasoning to believe either side. Although the doctor is simply trying to bring back his daughter's former beauty, to make her normal once more, he is subsequently ruining the lives of other young women, making it so that they will never be normal ever again. Passion, guilt, and morals all clash heads in this film and throughout the course of it I felt differently about the idea at different times after seeing different sides of the story. I thought the ending would pick a side and force me to believe in whatever the director had thought would have been the best idea to convey, but rather it leaves you with an ironic twist of fate that speaks more truth than I could ever try to explain, and won't because it would spoil it for you, but it manages to leave you satisfied with the given conclusion.

Several other directors have used similar imagery to Eyes Without a Face's in their films, most notably John Carpenter (Halloween, Escape from New York) who's villain Michael Myers in his film Halloween is a definite homage to Christiane's mask in the film, as well as such other directors as John Woo and Jesús Franco, both of which have used and cited Eyes Without a Face as an influence for their movies as well. British singer Billy Idol explained that his song "Eyes Without a Face" was inspired by the film, and that the lyrics are in fact a reconfiguring of the relationship between the doctor and Christiane, the song telling a story about the singer's relationship with his lover instead though.

Panned by critics upon its release as an exploitative gross-out film, Eyes Without a Face did not receive high regards until it was rediscovered in the 1980s, upon which time many film connoisseurs came to see past the film for what it seems to be on the surface and saw it for its true deep, thought-provoking nature. A DVD of the film was released in 2004 by the Criterion Collection, and is fairly common to find anywhere. With its horror style concept, themes of morality vs. passion, and poetic storytelling, I would recommend Eyes Without a Face to anyone looking for something different out of a movie yet still wanting something profound out of it as well, who doesn't mind the fact that it is a foreign-language film with subtitles. If you give the film a chance, I'm pretty sure you won't be disappointed. I give it a 5 out of 5, definitely go see it. As always, I'm NoirMan and this has been a miscellaneous movie review. Night.

Dark City (1998)

Few films that I've seen can be categorized under the specific niche genre of "neo-noir", a modern day revisiting of the classic genre from the 40s and 50s. Neo-noir films sprang up in the 1980s with such films as Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, and James Cameron's The Terminator, and continued through into the 90s with Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and the Japanese animated film Ghost in the Shell, among several other titles, usually categorized by their noir-esque subject matter and vibe, yet set in either the modern day or even the future, hence the "neo" part.

Dark City, directed by Alex Proyas (the same director of The Crow and I, Robot), came towards the tail end of the era generally excepted as the the main bulk of the time neo-noir films were made, i.e. the late 1990s, early 2000s. It follows the exploits of John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell), who at the start of the film awakens to find himself in a bathtub with a dead body in the next room and no recollection of what's happened. Fleeing the scene, he becomes pursued by strange men, yet is able to give them the slip with psychokinetic powers that he has no control over. Seeking help from a Dr. Daniel Schreber (Keifer Sutherland), he learns that the men pursuing him are a group of aliens known as "the Strangers", and that the city that they live in is of their creation, used to control the lives of its inhabitants in order for them to study the condition of the human soul in a hope of understanding how we as humans work. He works for them by developing serums that they use every night at midnight, in which the entire populace of the city falls asleep, allowing the Strangers to go around and switch around people's lives to their liking, injecting them with the serums to change their memories in order for them to fit the part. Along with Inspector Frank Bumstead (William Hurt), Daniel and John attempt to unravel the conspiracy of the Strangers and find out who exactly they, in terms of their identity, are.

The film, hence the title, is very dark, and there is only one instance in the film where there is any natural sunlight, as is it explained that the Strangers hate sunlight and as such keep the city in a perpetual state of night. It helps add to the mystique of the film I feel, as it brings the viewer into the same situation that the main characters are presented in: lost among the endless night of the cityscape, unraveling the context of the situations put forth before them, seeing that there is in fact a grander scheme to the entirety of the city, and trying to grasp onto any semblance of past memories and places that they can think of in order to continue their investigation. It has very noir like environments, with low lit hotel lobbies, seedy back alleyways, neon-lit main streets, smoke filled nightclubs with performing cabarets, the regulars in a genre like this, but also hinting at a bit of a German expressionist design, to the movie specific locations such as the cold, foreign laboratory of the Stangers' mothership. The movie always manages to keep the places interesting and fitting with the overall mood of the film, especially since the Strangers change the look of the city in order to fit with the people's new memories each night. The movie borrows other aesthetic ideas from such earlier films as Nosferatu and Fritz Lang's Metropolis and M, all three of which were cited as inspiration for the film, especially Metropolis which uses the large cityscape to further project the theme of the film, used in Dark City as well with the changing city going hand-in-hand with the inhabitant's changing memories. With its ever constant changing and stylized atmosphere, I was never bored or uninterested with where the movie took me, a definite good mark in my book.

Dark City in a sense is a modern retelling of Plato's "Allegory of the Cave", a story he uses in which his mentor Socrates tells Plato's brother Glaucon an allegory of men living in a cave and watching the shadows of the passerby, the men thinking that the shadows are the only things of importance, for humans living and thinking that they and the world around them are the only things worth noting, and that a philosopher such as himself has broken free of those chains of perception to think of things in different, not always so-orthodox ways to come up with new ideas and beliefs. In the city where the residents live their lives without realizing that they're in fact completely set up for them by the Strangers each night, John is able to break free from the Strangers' grasp and see the city for what it really is, that everyone else is just an experiment under observation. At the end of the movie when John takes control of the city himself, he is given control to choose what its inhabitants will do, becoming in a sense the Glaucon in the story by understanding what Socrates has told him. 

The film also borrows other aspects from other such films as Katsushiro Otomo's epic Akira, most notably its ending sequence, and other directors such as Christopher Nolan have cited it as influence for their films, Nolan stating that it, The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, and other films from the late neo-noir era, which includes his early film Memento, helped inspire him to create his film Inception, as these films also gravitate around the idea of the world of the movie not necessarily being real. Dark City and The Matrix are also often compared to one another, as the genre, plot, ideas, and stylization of both films are quite similar to one another.

Although doing quite well in the box office and being nominated for and winning several awards, Dark City is not well known by many people and is often considered a cult classic among its fans. A DVD of the film was released in mid-1998, and a director's cut version of the film on both DVD and Blu-ray was released in 2008. If you're a fan of either science-fiction, noir, or the movies of such directors as Christopher Nolan or the Wachowski brothers, or are just looking for something that's been under the mainstream radar yet has thought provoking, philosophical undertones, then I would recommend this movie to you. It's well made, has an interesting setting and cast of characters, and will leave you thinking about it for a while to come. I'd give it a 4 out of 5, go check it out. As always, I'm NoirMan and this has been a miscellaneous movie review. Night.

What to Expect

Good evening. Nice to make your acquaintance. I am NoirMan, the reviewer of movies. Not necessarily new movies released in the theaters, not necessarily old classics you should go out and rent, but rather movies from any time and any place in the history of film. Any avenue and genre of film is open to review here, picked from a list of movies I feel like talking about, updated constantly as I see new movies. Whatever I review depends on whatever movie I either have on my mind, I saw recently, I feel deserves some recognition for being extremely underrated, excruciatingly horrible, a schlock-fest, etc., or I just really like just depends on my mood and what I feel like talking about whenever I write. Pretty much don't expect anything specific unless I say what I'm going to be talking about or something like that. Feel free to ask me anything about the movies I review or things relating to them, and I'll get back to you on it.

Also, I'm open to movie recommendations of any kind. If it looks interesting, I'll probably check it out, so yeah. Night.