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Disfigured doves and blackened mirrors, the frisson nonpareil of morbid poetry. Bearded and bespectacled like Pasteur, the doctor (Pierre Brasseur) holds an audience rapt with accounts of skin-grafting experiments while his loyal assistant (Alida Valli) dumps a trenchcoat-wrapped cadaver into the Seine. He adjusts the wreaths at a bogus funeral ("I like order") and tends to his mutilated daughter (Edith Scob), a most dainty zombie. The chateau on the edge of the city has a secret surgery room and howling hounds in cages, the waif glides from floor to floor in a pearly mask with unmoving lips and traumatized eyes. (An ethereal Maurice Jarre valse underscores her suffering, to contrast with the demented tinkling that accompanies the secretary's stalking of pretty students.) "I've done so much wrong for a miracle..." Georges Franju on Hollywood horror like Baudelaire on Poe, a stark and tender view: The Phantom of the Opera and Bride of Frankenstein are clearly indicated, Valli sizing up a victim in Atget nocturnal exteriors evokes Dracula's Daughter. (Rosemary's Baby and Silence of the Lambs are among the beneficiaries.) Reminders of the Occupation linger in this overcast Paris, where warped devotion is the ultimate fright—haughty and grave, the doctor conducts his atrocities for the sake of a beloved woman who can only wither from anguish and guilt. A system of ineffable effects (the languid slouch of the lifeless figure in the backseat of a car, a visit to the cemetery interrupted by the soft whoosh of an airplane, a dormant fireplace abruptly inflamed by a chloroformed rag) comprises Franju's tessitura of cruelty and lyricism, a camera that gazes at a gruesome transplant with something like nightmarish serenity. "Sourire, sourire... Pas trop." The ending is Goya's The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters but with the heroine wide awake at last. Cinematography by Eugen Schüfftan. With Juliette Mayniel, Alexandre Rignault, Béatrice Altariba, François Guérin, and Claude Brasseur. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |