In this year’s Oscar-winning short film, The Neighbours’ Window , an exhausted New Yorker in her late 30s discovers a curious mode of entertainment. What starts as a brief respite from her laidback husband and three teething kids turns into a part-time addiction. Living in the apartment building directly opposite hers is an attractive couple in their early 20s. They don’t believe in curtained windows. Consequently, the naked glass doubles up as a television screen broadcasting the feverish youth of fresh companionship.
She can see them – loving, living, partying, drinking, dancing, fornicating, fornicating some more. As the seasons pass, she is hooked. She can’t look, but she can’t look away. She rises at the dead of night to observe them. She is envious of their stamina, raw desire and flexible fondness. While she cleans baby poop and struggles to hide her wrinkles, they seem to be nurturing the boundless hope she once had.
Untold tales
Great films are revealed not by the story they choose to tell but by the promise of stories they leave untold. For instance, Lulu Wang’s award-winning The Farewell is filmed from the perspective of its most unassuming character: A second-generation Chinese immigrant from Manhattan, who visits her ancestral town to aid the charade of protecting her grandmother from bad news. The family stages her cousin’s ‘wedding’ to congregate at home one last time, while keeping the old lady in the dark about her own cancer. Most filmmakers might have fashioned a crowd-pleasing romcom based on the outsider: the cousin’s Japanese girlfriend who gamely fakes her marriage into the Chinese family. But Wang opts for a more rooted stance to examine the cultural oddities of her land.
Similarly, there are several cinematic options offered by the tale of an unsatisfied “middle-aged” wife spying on her neighbours. For starters, there’s an intense film in how her intrusive habit affects her marriage. At one point, her husband wakes up to an empty bed and strolls into the living room to find her fixated on the glass castle opposite them. Yet, writer-director Marshall Curry does not pursue this easy sub-narrative. He doesn’t pursue a genre angle either: What if she witnesses something dangerous? An assault, a murder?
Impending loss
Instead, The Neighbours’ Window is at once simple and profound: She sees in window-shaped frames, which is why everything looks like a symmetrical portrait of perfection to her. When she soon notices the boy’s clean-shaven head and frail body, the frame comes undone. It is the tangible equivalent of a couple sharing their most private moment – of impending loss – with the world in an emotional Facebook status message. And a poignant display picture.
The downturn reveals what this 20-minute film really is: A charmingly constructed critique of an age in which social media has yanked away the curtains from the windows of carefully curated homes. She isn’t invading their space as much as inviting herself to imagine the air they breathe. It’s not voyeurism as much as it is the innate human hunger to live vicariously through unreachable faces.
Yearning the opposite
Most of us grow up learning to want what others have. But in the process of admiring the exotic paint-jobs of faraway rooms, we forget that our walls bear windows too. When I recently bumped into an old acquaintance, he couldn’t stop expressing his envy for my ‘bachelor’ lifestyle: The relationships, the writing, the travelling, the freedom. There was nothing he didn’t know. It felt nice to be seen. So I didn’t tell him that I had forever craved for the stability he so grudgingly advertised on his timelines. I didn’t tell him that I was jealous of his lovely house, his well-paying job, his family dinners, his handsome dog, his parents’ 40-year anniversary party. I didn’t even tell him that I knew the precise date he had proposed to his childhood sweetheart. Who was I to remind him that his drapes were transparent too?
The penultimate scene of the film unites the watcher and the watched: two sets of eyes that don’t have the heart to un-know one another in person. When the grieving girl confesses that she had in fact been watching – and bashfully appreciating – the family all along, I couldn’t help but wonder if the famous stars I admire, secretly long for the isolation in my words. Maybe they want my ordinariness. My Neighbours’ Window concludes with a shot of the window that the girl would glimpse from corners of her fragile home. The frame is perfect: Parents, three kids, a future, the classical portrait of hope itself. We are left with this image of “the neighbour’s window”. And a hint of how the story might have looked from the other viewpoint. After all, great films are revealed not by what they choose to say but by the promise of what they leave unsaid.
