"a presciently sympathetic take on sexual perversity that torpedoed Powell's career.
Historically, PEEPING TOM is a presciently sympathetic take on sexual perversity that totally torpedoed Michael Powell's career, thanks to islanders' true-blue insularity, but has earned its overdue cachet through years when it reaches a wider audience around the globe, partially because its then -controversial topic now can be liberally appreciated as an incisive meta-reflection of cinema itself.
Watching films is a de facto act of voyeurism, albeit a passive one, a prerequisite a spectator might subliminally intend to overlook when its more overtly entertaining value is in full swing, and in PEEPING TOM, Powell, drawing on Leo Marks deviant if dumbed- down script, formulates a lurid mise-en-scène of a fear-collector-turned-murderer young cinematographer Mark Lewis (Böhm, of SISSI trilogy fame), who is (sexually) obsessed with mortal fear engendered by his female victims when their last breaths begin to dawn on them, and he films their last moments and savors them in his solitary dark room. Also, he has a unique way to magnify their terror, which Powell tactfully reveals in the climax, as an answer to the film's innovative killer's viewfinder's POV in its prologue.
Albeit its slasher (avant la lettre) template (suspense and horror is downplayed in favor of a manner of poised characterization), PEEPING TOM looks directly into the psychological cause of Mark's perversity, a child guinea-pig of his senseless scientist father, grows up in a disturbed, recorded and wired environment that substantially alters his perception and psyche. Critically, by dint of Böhm's taciturn, sensitive and inner-struggling performance, Powell pegs Mark as both a victimizer and a victim, an approach doesn't fall in line with moral rigidity but sequentially humanizes our monster, particularly, by pairing him with a guileless if somewhat cheeky girl-next-door Helen Stephens (a feisty Massey, holds our attention in her brilliant reaction shots when the crunch demands),to whom he might have a slender chance of a normal relationship if he can suppress his morbid proclivity (at one point, she even successfully persuades him to have a date with her without his phantom limb, the 16mm movie camera), yet faint that, precious chink of warmth is inevitably diminished after his another wanton surge, he has no alternative but to exact his final act to seal his preordained seal, and simultaneously, sate his persisting fixation.
Apart from Massey's counterpoising presence of innocuousness, other two supporting performances are also noteworthy, famed ballerina Moira Shearer (in her third and last collaboration with Powell), as a clueless stand-in Vivian, obliviously twirls around Mark as he carefully prepare for her impending quietus, makes a striking example of a beauty's tragic end, which is sheer in contrast to Maxine Audley's steely lucidity as Helen's blind mother, who is luckily spared for her visual unresponsiveness, a thinly veiled metaphor of an aging/unassuming woman's vanishing sex appeal ( she is only three years older than Shearer).
Deeply steeped in its counter-genre variegated shades and musician Brian Easdale's compelling virtuosity and cadenza, to all intents and purposes, PEEPING TOM thrives as a thought-provoking tall tale whose message might be well ahead of its time, but in terms of cinematic grandeur , it is a trailblazer that often imitated but rarely eclipsed.
referential entries: Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO (1960, 9.2/10); Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's BLACK NARCISSUS (1947, 8.3/10).
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