Tomb

Recently, the recipient of the world's first full-face transplant spoke to his doctors at a press conference, although I’m not too sure what he said. His new lips wouldn't move and I think he was speaking in Spanish. He probably said something along the lines of “Thanks for the face.”

The point is, face transplant surgery isn't just happening in movies anymore. Real doctors are improving the lives of real patients with this procedure. But while we’re all learning about the new frontiers of medical science, we're also starting to remember just how implausible the movie Face/Off (1997) was.

If you recall, Face/Off was a phenomenally successful action movie from acclaimed director John Woo. In it, John Travolta and Nicolas Cage respectively play an FBI agent and a terrorist who surgically swap faces. The central concept is completely impossible to believe, but we went along with it at the time because the action sequences were as awesome as they were ludicrous.

Here’s the gist: In Face/Off, the FBI agent (Travolta) needs to disguise himself as the terrorist (Cage) in order to get some important information out of an incarcerated criminal. Sure, there are other, easier ways to get information out of an incarcerated criminal, but the movie doesn't concern itself with them. So one (one!) doctor cuts off Cage's face and plants it on Travolta.

There is no scarring, stitching, bruising or tissue rejection. In fact, the resemblance is perfect despite the fact that the face is now on a different head, and the topic of immunosuppressive drug treatment never even arises (consider disbelief suspended). Then, the movie suddenly remembers that the character's voices wouldn't change, and makes up some kind of bullshit voice-disguising microchip doohickey and hopes that the audience won't ask questions. Right.

When the terrorist wakes up from his coma, he kidnaps the doctor and demands to have the only face available (Travolta's) stitched on to his raggedy, bloody head — a feat, as it’s difficult to hold a conversation without a set of lips. The doctor apparently also has access to a voice microchip that sounds like Travolta, and he throws it in as a nice little bonus for the murdering psychopath. Why? Hell if I know. We don’t think about the plot too much; there are enough amazing gun battles and speedboat chases to keep us busy.

On the other hand, the ne plus ultra of face transplant movies is Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux sans Visage) (1960), a French black-and-white horror film as lyrical and sophisticated as Face/Off is noisy and dumb. A misguided surgeon (Pierre Brasseur) seeks to repair the damage done to the face of his daughter (Edith Scob) in an automobile accident he had caused. He kidnaps young women and removes their faces, transplanting them onto his daughter, but the grafts never last long, forcing him to repeat the cycle.

At its most heartbreaking, there’s a sequence where the procedure seems successful, and the daughter is restored to her former beauty. But at this point, the film switches to a series of clinical photographs; her new features eventually decay as her body rejects the transplant. The now-ruined face must be removed, and the daughter is devastated — not by her own plight, but by the realization that she can't prevent her father from killing more victims.

Despite the gruesome subject matter, Eyes Without a Face is a beautiful (if troubling) film. Several audience members fainted when it screened at the 1960 Edinburgh film festival, causing director Georges Franju to rather snarkily comment that he now “knows why Scotsmen wear skirts.” Critics at the time were underwhelmed or nauseated, but since then, the film’s proven to be an important classic.

Thanks for the face, indeed.