Beauty

Posted by Lori Henry Jun 26, 2006

I watched the French film "Les Yeux Sans Visage" (Eyes Without a Face), by George Franju, last night and it brought up some interesting questions about identity.

The story follows an obsessive Doctor as he tries to find a way to give his daughter back a face. While driving "like a lunatic" one night, they get into a car accident and the young daughter somehow ends up with just a disfigured face (hey, it's a 1959 horror flick, stretch your imagination a little bit!).

The father ends up murdering other young women who have the same type of face as his daughter by taking them to his lab underneath his home in the French countryside. His surrogate wife, whose face has also been "saved" by this Doctor, lures the young ladies into the house with her innocent-seeming tactics. But as each surgery fails and more women go missing, he starts running out of time as the police get closer to the truth.

Anyways, apart from the horror of it making me close my eyes (there's a scene that's graphic and disgusting, even by today's standards) and squirm, it also made me think about how much our identity lies in our appearance. We put so much energy into looking a certain way, dressing in a certain style and trying to come across as a certain person, what happened if that was erased and all we had left was a disfigured body or face?

Who are we without our make up bag, hair products and stylish clothing?