This is a kind of interesting amalgamation of...dramatic skits with a splash of black comedy? It’s like if the theater students and the film students got together after graduating and made a movie. 1969 timeframe, so yeah, it’s totally counterculture kinda stuff. The Artist, unleashed!
We have Jon Rubin (De Niro), back from Nam, looking for an apartment. He finds a shitty one, the shittiest one maybe, but it’s got a nice view. Of the apartments across the way. He likes to watch what goes on, and he tries to make a career out of it. “Peep Art” is his take on it. Sleazy but potentially profitable. Unfortunately for Jon and his well-laid plottenings, things don’t go as planned so he’s off to find a different career as, well, some other stuff?
This is one of the early films by Brian De Palma, where you see a lot of hand-held point of view shots in a film vérité kinda fashion. But it’s like Film 101, with a dash of Sex Ed, with how things play out. The first part is kinda amusing if a bit naughty, then it goes into some counterculture stuff presented through an NPR lens that is both “dramatic” and pretty lame. Definitely a product of the times, things have changed quite a bit since then. Some may not think it has, but, yeah, it has.
