Cinequest: PEEPERS

"Peeping Toms are never praised, like novelists or bird watchers, for their keenness of observation."

- W.H. Auden

So opens Peepers, directed by Seth Owen, and written by Owen, Daniel Perlmutter, and Mark Slutsky.  The ensemble story centers on a band of voyeurs who spend their spare evenings crawling the rooftops of Montreal in search of a good peep.  Some are looking for sexy show, some are merely interested in what other people do in the privacy of their uncurtained homes.  In an age of ubiquitous surveillance, an age in which sharing intimate details of one's life online (and being welcomed to nose around in others') is commonplace, it isn't difficult to empathize with them.  Like the protagonist of Hitchcock's Rear Window, we are easily caught up in the drama of real lives--any lives but our own.

Armed with binoculars and walkie-talkies, they are a close-knit group.  They have their own lingo, and their behavior is governed by a decades-old code.  Their relatively peaceful existence is thrown into chaos by the arrival of an interloper: a professor who teaches a course in "exhibition theory" at university and is looking to do some field research with her class.  She infiltrates the group and finds herself developing an interest in peeping that goes beyond the academic.

It's a well-structured, well-paced film featuring some surprisingly nuanced performances for such an unpretentious light comedy.  The delightfully Madeleine Kahn-ish Janine Theriault, as the bright and brittle professor, particularly stands out.  Solid throughout, the narrative does falter at the end, though.  The climax is weak, and, instead of providing any resolution or strong suggestion of where the characters are going, the story simply meanders to a halt.  There is no sense of intentional ambiguity, as one might expect when dealing with a topic as fertile and charged as voyeurism.  Instead, the story closes as if the filmmakers had abruptly drawn a curtain across the window into their characters' lives.  Appropriate?  Sure.  Satisfying?  Not so much.

The ending is to be forgiven, however, in light of the film's good qualities, and for a couple of scene sequences which elevate it above quite a lot of similar fare.  One of the peepers tumbles from a fire escape and spends the rest of the movie resting his injured leg by his apartment window, binoculars at the ready.  A winsome new neighbor moves in across the street.  He peeps her; she notices and flirts with him.  They end up sharing a clumsy dinner date at her place, but they're too stifled by this sudden proximity to properly express their feelings.  Eventually, they find the solution: they dine and even dance together, each in his or her own window, the space of the street and two layers of glass separating them.  They are clearly enthralled with one another and perfectly happy and content with this arrangement.

In the film's most poignant moment, the shyest and quietest of the peepers stands outside his own house, watching his wife and child at the dinner table through the dining room window.  He has so much trouble relating to them face-to-face that one wonders how he came to be married and a father in the first place.  But the moment is so profoundly, painfully beautiful that one overlooks this minor quibble.  In person, he is awkward and stuttering, yet when he regards them from darkness, through the filter of the window, we see in his face everything he feels for them and everything he wishes he could say.  A cynic might argue that such a scene is predictable, even cloying, and in the hands of a less sensitive director, it might be.  But Owen executes it with such tenderness and such knowing yet subtle depth that it, alone, is almost worth the price of admission.