(From Caniba)

Two documentaries at the New York Film Festival show just how dark human sexuality can be, getting disturbingly up close and personal with the forbidden desires of their subjects. Both take on notable news stories: Voyeur, coming to Netflix and to theaters Dec. 1, is the tale of Gerald Foos, the man who installed a secret “viewing platform” in the attic of his motel in the Denver suburbs, so he could spy on his guests around the clock. Caniba, which also made its US premiere at the festival, is the story of Issei Sagawa, the Japanese man who killed a woman in Paris and ate parts of her in order to satisfy a cannibalism fetish.

The films are similar in that their subjects committed their crimes years ago and barely had to answer for their sins. In 1980, Foos sent an anonymous letter to journalist Gay Talese, who was then preparing to publish his sexual treatise Thy Neighbor’s Wife, confessing that for the past 15 years he had spied on guests and meticulously logged their sexual activities in a journal, “purely out of unlimited curiosity about people and not as just a deranged voyeur.” Talese signed an agreement not to name Foos, and only convinced him to come forward after the statute of limitations had passed. The incredible story was finally told in the New Yorker in April of last year, with a book, The Voyeur’s Motel, following soon after.

Sagawa, meanwhile, shot and killed a Sorbonne classmate in 1981 and feasted on her over the course of two days before he was caught trying to dump her body parts. He was eventually deported to Japan and released from a hospital there after doctors found him sane; after being held for just five years, he was free to go, and ended up starring in a porn film, reviewing restaurants, and publishing a manga retelling of the crime.

From Caniba)

The porn film, in which a woman pees on Sagawa as he bites her and pleasures himself, is how Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, directors of Caniba, ended up finding the notorious cannibal. During a press conference at Lincoln Center, the filmmakers explained that they were originally commissioned to make a documentary about the Fukushima nuclear disaster, but while researching Japanese culture, their interest was piqued by pinku-eiga, the low-budget, 35mm adult films that were popular from the ’60s to the ’80s. Moved by the fact that the genre was disappearing, they decided to produce a pink film of their own; in working on The Eye’s Dream with adult auteur Sato Hisayasu, they learned that Hisayasu had cast Sagawa in one of his films, and they asked to be put in touch.

Caniba starts with a disclaimer that the filmmakers don’t condone Sagawa’s behavior. Paravel said the shoot, which occurred over the course of several visits to Sagawa’s apartment in the suburbs of Tokyo, “was the first time I was so challenged, ethically speaking.”

The film was, in part, an attempt at “taking seriously somebody who has been vilified out of existence,” Castaing-Taylor said. “Somebody who is considered in the Western press a wily, Oriental monster, who is so abject, who is so monstrous that it is basically morally heinous even to engage with the vulnerable, flawed human emotions that he himself entertains, which propelled him to act on his desire.”

Whereas Voyeur attempts to explain the source of Foos’s fetish (as a child, he spied on an aunt who walked around naked without her blinds drawn), Caniba does very little to tell us how, exactly, Sagawa’s sexual desires became tangled up with a hunger for human flesh. The documentary shares touching home video footage from Sagawa’s childhood, but for his stories about his parents’ sexual repression and his formative encounter with a schoolmate’s thigh, you’ll have to watch a short documentary that Vice published several years ago, when Sagawa was in better health and far more talkative.

Paravel said the original cut of Caniba had more explanation, but the filmmakers began stripping it out as they realized “there is not one single cause of determinism.”

As Castaing-Taylor sees it, the film is an “invocation of sibling rivalry” more than it is a meditation on cannibalism. It focuses not just on Sagawa, but also on his brother and caretaker, Jun. We watch as Jun, supposedly for the first time, learns of the manga created by his brother. Jun acts revolted and embarrassed as his brother slowly pages through the horrifically graphic depictions of his butchery, but that same night the filmmakers learn that Jun has a violent fetish of his own. As demonstrated on camera, he enjoys stabbing his arms with knives, wrapping barbed wire around them, and, yes, biting them.

Just as Sagawa is doted on by his brother, Foos also has a confidant in his wife. Foos’s first wife, who died in 1985, would bring him Cokes during his surveillance sessions and sometimes even accompanied him on them. In Voyeur, his second wife, Anita, comes off as a silent, supportive type as Foos clearly revels in the attention of the cameras (it’s implied that we, along with the filmmakers and Talese, are voyeurs for being fascinated by all of this.)

From Voyeur.

It can be argued that Foos also has another accomplice in Talese, who during the early ’80s actually accompanied the voyeur on one of his viewings in order to verify that his “observation platform” actually existed. Just as Caniba focuses on what Paravel described as “the love and the rivalry” between Sagawa and his brother, Voyeur follows Talese, the svelte, stylish Manhattan socialite, as his reputation becomes entangled with Foos, an obese, self-described loner who collects coins, Barbies, and firearms almost to the point of hoarding.

At times, the relationship between journalist and subject seems almost collaborative. Part of Talese’s job with regard to Foos, he says, is to “hold his hand” through the publication process. Talese admits that he has “instructed” his subject not to answer the phone or the door for other reporters.

“I’m pretty excited about this book, Gay!” Foos carps before the New Yorker story comes out.

“Hurray for you and the motel,” Talese responds, though he later admits to the camera that Foos is “waiting to be crucified.”

As it turns out, of course, Talese is also crucified. Shortly before The Voyeur’s Motel is published by Grove/Atlantic (my onetime employer), property records discovered by the Washington Post contradict Foos’s claims about when, exactly, he owned the motel. Suddenly, a “fucking pissed” Talese is calling Foos a “crazy guy” who took his career and reputation “on a long ride into oblivion.” Foos, for his part, is also “really pissed off”—not because the New Yorker article revealed his creepy sexual proclivities, but because Talese exposed his valuable baseball card collection. “I’m the guy, not him!” Foos yells, in a fit of something akin to sibling rivalry.

Ultimately, because filmmakers Myles Kane and Josh Koury took the time to follow this rollercoaster of a story from beginning to end, Voyeur is considerably more riveting than Caniba, even if it isn’t quite as disturbing. It’s also visually appealing, thanks to its snapshots of Talese’s famous writing “bunker” and diorama reenactments of Foos’s escapades in the motel. Meanwhile, Caniba is comprised of extreme, often blurry close-ups of the faces of Sagawa and his brother as they engage in pedestrian, mind-numbingly boring household activities.

Paravel said she and Castaing-Taylor wanted to film Sagawa in “a way in which you cannot escape him,” in keeping with their experience of interviewing him in a small apartment. In this way, Caniba, like Voyeur, is also a meta commentary on journalism and filmmaking. “We were trapped in this very tiny space with him and we could not escape him as a human being; weak, aging, and also the man who murdered and raped and ate someone,” she said. “We went through the same conflictual relationship with him and we were wanting to face him and engage with that.”

Update: This post has been updated with the release date of “Voyeur.”