1980, USA
The only directorial effort of cinematographer Gordon Willis (The Godfather trilogy, Woody Allen’s long-time DoP from Annie Hall, Manhattan, Interiors and more), Windows is a camp classic that is only starting to be appreciated alongside early ’80s voyeuristic thrillers like The Fan, Eyes of a Stranger and De Palma’s Dressed to Kill and Body Double.
Opening with a stunning Antonioni-esque long-shot down the futuristic neon-encircled tunnel at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, we are introduced to Emily (Talia Shire), a mousy and quiet woman – the latter trait due to a stuttering problem – in the middle of a divorce.
Walking into her dark apartment, she is immediately grabbed from behind and thrown down on the couch by a man with a knife.
The room is dark (in some moments completely black so that we can only hear what is happening) and his face is mostly obscured save for large protruding lips and a big nose.
He puts the knife in her mouth and tells her to lift up her shirt, and then demands that she moan with pleasure repeatedly while he records it to micro-cassette.
The next morning as she is filing the police report, her imposing friend Andrea (gravelly voiced character actress Elisabeth Ashley, the shrink from Vampire’s Kiss) stops by and discourages Emily from telling the police anything, saying they’re never going to catch the person that did it anyway.
Andrea’s motive isn’t concern for Emily’s comfort level though – she has a lesbian fixation on Emily and paid the attacker to get the recording, which she listens to repeatedly when she is home alone.
It’s while she’s in a cab on her way to work that Emily recognizes the cabbie’s voice as that of the man who attacked her (Rick Petrucelli, best known as the star-struck idiot outside the theatre in Annie Hall), and his identity card matches what little she was able to see of his face.
She asks him to stop at a payphone momentarily, saying she had forgotten she was supposed to meet a friend, and calls the police – getting back in the cab to continue until the cops can catch up with her.
With the man arrested he confesses that he was paid to do the job – but won’t reveal his accomplice without the charges being dropped.
The cops think he’s bluffing.
After the attack, Emily moves into a large high rise on the waterfront in Brooklyn, and Andrea gets an apartment directly across the river so that she can watch her through a telescope.
But when Emily starts getting romantically involved with the detective assigned to her case (Joseph Cortese), Andrea starts to get itchy for something to happen.
The extent of her madness comes out in her therapy sessions, where she feels she can express herself most freely, even though she clearly sees her shrink as an antagonist.
Her therapist tries to make her see that her ‘relationship’ with Emily is one-sided, and that any romantic potential is in her head, but Andrea responds with spurts of anger, alternately whispering and shouting, physically hunched and tense.
That her therapist won’t indulge her fantasies infuriates her.
He makes arrangements for her to be admitted so that she can work through her fantasies in a ‘safe’ environment like a hospital: he obviously thinks she’s dangerous.
And he’s right.
While we get glimpses of her mental state in her therapy sessions, it’s when Andrea finally has Emily alone, late at night, that her craziness is most physically manifested.
She shakes, her voice cuts in and out, mirroring Emily’s stutter, and she gives Emily a frightening play-by-play of her rape, having memorized it by rote by listening to the recording.
Through this verbal replay in combination with the film’s many references to scopophilia, Windows also comments on the dissociative qualities of fandom in general – there’s a thin line between Andrea’s hysterical ‘performance’ and that of fans who recite back their favourite lines to the directors, writers or actors who created them.
The film did not fare well upon release – being nominated for 5 Razzie Awards, including those for acting and directing – ensuring that Gordon Willis would never sit in the director’s chair again, which is a shame.
As a cinematographer, Willis’s composition is meticulous (most notably his hallmark lighting choices) and he succeeds in building and maintaining tension, even though the film’s plotting is fairly safe.
And while Shire’s acting is understated to the point of being lacklustre, to call Elizabeth Ashley’s psycho performance worthy of a Razzie is nonsense.
The film also suffered negative criticism for its depiction of a gay character as psychotic, but like William Friedkin’s Cruising (which suffered the same fate), time has endeared the film to some factions of the gay community.
hexafu 