The Conversation Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Year: 1974 Country: U.S. Gender: Thriller / Mystery
Rating: 8.5/10 Cast: Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Cindy Williams, Frederic Forrest, Teri Garr, Robert Duvall and Harrison Ford
Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is a technical specialist sound is commissioned to record the conversation between a young couple in a crowded plaza of San Francisco. However, when it comes time to deliver the record, Harry is thrown back and is warned of the danger of the material you have in your hands. Back in his lab, listen to the tapes carefully and detects them as evidence of a possible assassination attempt against the couple who had been followed. The fact that in the past three people were killed because of another record did induce him to consider the ethical responsibility of their work. In 1974, when he had just made public the Watergate scandal, Francis Ford Coppola made "The Conversation." Used a script he had written several years earlier, and was why we had to hear the charge opportunistic timing of the take to the screen. Perhaps the ticket was favored (although the public success was poor), but time and a careful reading of the film, show that their approach goes well beyond the circumstances in which it appeared. A remarkable number of factors make "The Conversation" is a key part in the career of its director, starting with strictly short-term, note that this film won the prestigious Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1974.
The legendary film "Blow Up" (1966) by Michelangelo Antonioni, also winner of the Palme d'influence in the genesis of the project. In Antonioni's film, the protagonist was a photographer who discovered a crime through some snapshots taken in a London park. Coppola replaced that whole world of cameras and photographic equipment with a new one where the devices used to capture the reality were microphones and tapes. In both cases, the technique was treated as an extension of the senses, an instrument that was used to perceive what the eye and the ear had not been able to see or hear. To perform this exercise approach to facts, Coppola decided to give his film a slow pace that allowed the viewer to go slowly and more contemplative as possible in the narrative. This treatment completely determined approach was to have the film: how to display the events became so detailed and thorough. In "The Conversation", figure out things at the same time the protagonist, through a subjective point of view, that we never know more than he knows. A similar situation can be noticed in the recent film "The Lives of Others" (2006). Moreover, Harry is a loner and moody. Strain has developed a distrust of professional people and introverted character that make him a being uncommunicative.
This aspect puts them back on tape Coppola with Antonioni's work (no doubt, the most daring writer of the drama of human inability to communicate). Harry Caul lives all alone in an apartment in theory no one has access and is protected with enhanced security measures. Never give your phone number to anyone and always attracts clients from a car. Your daily life is surrounded by a deafening silence and hates to ask questions so as to exchange confidences. Aseptic character as they come, Caul is the spitting image of listless observer, always more concerned about how is the recording of what is recording. The staging is so precise that we are able to grasp all that sees the protagonist with the passivity that characterizes him. Changing attitude diametrically when the possibility of a crime awakens his conscience mechanisms of this prolonged state of lethargy and seeks to avoid that someone can be harmed because of him. Surprising is also the secondary and short of the then unknown Harrison Ford, making great business executive whose image display is a mixture of beauty and mystery. In the interest of the narrative Coppola strict and prefer a slower tempo, "The Conversation" takes on a hyper-realistic tone that comes to shock the viewer, who, at times, can have the impression of watching snippets of a private life.
However, as subjective perspective that takes the film causes excessive realism that runs from the opposite end, the deformation of the object referred to staff. It is then that gets really hostile environment for the protagonist because his mind, severely affected by paranoia, he suggests the idea that the old observer has now become the subject observed. But is it really? The answer lies in the hands of one viewer who has wanted to be surprised by this parable on the human inability to communicate, shot a flawless narrative pulse enveloped in an overwhelming atmosphere of suspense. Hackman is great in his complex role, which knows to provide a strong spirit and a mortifying introspective secrecy. In "The Conversation" there are different levels, interacting with each other in a way that could almost be described as dialectical, are being overtaken by other higher order which in turn generate a new interaction, to end leading to the final approach to the work . In a way the film has staged the transition from animality to humanity, traffic is marked by the assumption of moral consciousness. We are responsible for what we do, our actions are not free, its consequences are the result of the exercise of our freedom, and she can not resign. Hiding his face behind the curtain (as it did once before Caul not to take the three deaths caused their work) and will not serve to restore the lost peace.
In the 1970 Francis Ford Coppola film amounted to Olympus X-rayed the loneliness and the different conceptions of power. Michael Corleone in "Godfather
" (1972) and "The Godfather: Part II" (1974) and Captain Willard and Colonel Kurtz in "Apocalypse Now" (1979), which like Harry Caul are men sentenced to detained survive in bubble wrap. The isolation is, for them, the only way to preserve their power. In turn, this secrecy fed into them a self-destructive paranoia that devours any link between the character and environment. His loneliness is therefore absolute and irreversible. Thus, "The Conversation" shows the main character as being powerless before the murder, his mind is between the real and the unreal. The film also takes a source of "Steppenwolf" by Herman Hesse story which brings to the melancholy introspection, isolation, loneliness and unhappiness of his central character. The scene in which an alienated Caul destroys all your apartment trying in vain to find the micro to the being spied on, is simply heartbreaking. Again a gentle overview shows the claustrophobic space in which the character operates. Coppola brilliantly shows, while the physical deterioration of the apartment, the disposal of a desperate character, complementing off though, who have won their most important asset: their privacy, what he robs his victims. Where was the mic? We ask everyone. Coppola also has an answer for this: the only thing that Harry Caul ever shatter or abandon: his saxophone. This makes inanimate object Caul, at least briefly, in an emotional human being.
"The Conversation" is not a moralistic film. Its outcome is tragic, a little in the Greek sense of the term. Think that the individual is able to alter, by his conduct, the course of events is more than anything else, a symptom of arrogance. The staging used by Coppola and tells us so from the middle of the footage. The insignificance of the protagonist to the imposing building that is engineered to deliver the tapes, put things in place. Caul is not responsible for what happened, but one more piece of a mechanism that has used it to achieve its ends. The individual, far from being the center of decision will be relegated to insignificance, and most dramatic for him is that he can not return to origin, since, as mentioned, the route taken is irreversible. The result (Caul playing the saxophone at home) only alters the starting point in the destruction of the house, or, which is, in the destruction of himself as a person. His desperate search is a search on anything that has nothing to offer, as there is no specific place where the evil lies and to allow recovery of lost dignity. Taking his own misery, an assumption that can not even be willing to individuals who, like Caul, have been human, is all that remains. Currently haunting this film, beautiful depth that can be discovered in it, with nothing to do with economic opportunity at the time that he wanted to blame. Today the film continues to offer its revenues, while Watergate, of uncovering now, he would not be appropriate. Missed.
"excellent and masterful portrait of loneliness"
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