NYFF Spotlight: Voyeur

I’m thrilled to be covering a number of selections from the 55th Annual New York Film Festival, which takes place September 28th-October 15th.

Voyeur
Directed by Myles Kane and Josh Koury
NYFF Screenings

Even if there aren’t always two sides to every story, there are multiple ways of looking at something. People might decry a certain behavior that is not accepted by most in society, and the degrees to which it is deemed evil, villainous, or simply unusual can vary greatly. A man who buys a motel and designs the rooms so that he can watch guests from the ceiling in moments they believe are private definitely doesn’t fit into the definition of normal and socially acceptable, but this new documentary prepares an invigorating and surprisingly complex look at his take and his relationship with the journalist who shared his story with the public.

Gerald Foos owned a motel in Aurora, Colorado for a number of years between the 1960s and the 1990s and installed louvered vents so that he could spy on those staying in the rooms. The majority of what he saw were sexual interactions, but he also claims to have witnessed a murder in the 1980s that he says he reported to police. Though his guests were not aware that he was watching them, Foos did not keep his actions to himself, sharing them with his wife, to whom he introduced himself as a voyeur rather than a “Peeping Tom,” and with esteemed journalist Gay Talese, who wrote about him first in the New Yorker and then in a book called The Voyeur’s Motel.

This documentary is far brighter, less apologetic, and less creepy than this reviewer would have expected, featuring numerous interviews with Foos, now 82 years old, who eagerly shares some of his most vivid memories with a smile on his face. He discusses leaving things in the rooms, such as a pornographic magazine or a suitcase, to see how guests would react, and how after he saw someone selling drugs to kids, he went into the room and flushed the entire stash down the toilet. He says he believes that the statute of limitations has passed for any crimes he may have committed or witnessed, and though he is a bit strange, he’s far more intellectual and well-spoken than one might expect. His recorded response to the publication of the story is particularly fascinating since he seems to expect a more positive portrayal of his interesting life.

This is not simply Foos’ story, since Talese plays just as much of a role in the film. Hearing him talk about how he first met Foos and the things that he saw and heard is only the tip of the iceberg, since the path to publication of the book is equally interesting. When discrepancies in Gerald’s account begin to come out, Talese insists that he knows the motel is real since he was there and that is the meat of the story, not the specifics of when or where an isolated incident occurred. His relationship with this story is one of extreme investment, and its success is deeply tied with his own as an 84-year-old author with an incredible career behind him.

This wasn’t supposed to be the only film about Foos, with Steven Spielberg slated to produce an adaptation directed by Sam Mendes, which was scrapped when they found out that this film was already in the works. It is true that, as Mendes argued, this is a story perfectly fit to be told in documentary format, featuring extensive conversations with and between both Talese and Foos, and most memorably including several shots of Foos lifting off the top of a miniature reconstruction of a motel room in a very literal representation of his voyeurism. This film’s content is terrific, and the questions it raises about societal ethics, journalistic integrity, and the truth in an age where the term “fake news” is thrown around every day are well worth pondering.

B+