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Conversation Reviews
One of my five favorites
Pure, unpretentious genius unfolds before the viewer in this complex film, simply told, complete with what has to be one of the subtlest "gotchas" in cinema. From a cinematic perspective, The Conversation breaks the rules, which Coppola expertly reinvents, from the first slow, achingly long voyeuristic zoom into Union Square to the cold empty layers of Harry Caul's (his name a rather silly pun) apartment that echo his isolated, threatened existence. Coppola's camera distances the viewer from Caul, but just like Caul's transparent raincoat, we see beyond the lens into the quiet, tortured confines of Caul's mind.
As a story, The Conversation relies again upon subtlety and a patient viewer to watch Caul ironically become a casualty of his own profession. As Caul is the architect of his own success, he too becomes the architect of his own demise. The joke is on Harry, as the viewer, too, peers into the life of a man obsessed with privacy, a man who ultimately faces an unthinkable future...life under an ever watchful eye.
The Coversation: what the autistic cannot hear
Harry Caul is an expert in the field of electronic surveillance. He has been hired by the director of a large corporation to record a conversation between his wife and another man. It is no easy feat. The conversation will occur in a noisy public place. The targets know they may be watched. They speak low, allusively and are forever in motion. Caul, his assistant Stan and two students borrowed from the AV department of a nearby university tape the conversation with but three pickups: a mic planted in the shopping bag of a man following the couple and two parabolic microphones mounted with cross-hairs from atop surrounding buildings. Later, and further to his expertise, Harry will sit at a bench in his workshop with four tape players and will slowly begin to cut and mix the recordings into an intelligible, uninterrupted run of speech-a conversation, the conversation.
The story owes a little something to Antonioni's Blow Up (in which a photographer tries to decipher a tale seemingly told in a series of grainy, blown-up photographs) and the character of Harry Caul may be a descendent of Kafka's harassed tribe of persecuted everymen. Harry knows both too much and too little; he is an expert and an innocent. He can tape anyone anywhere and lift the fuzz of ambient noise and extraneous voicings from the most impossibly difficult mixes; but Harry lives at a remove, at a distance from the world on which he spies. His experience of the world outside his lab is always mediated through some mechanical filter: a microphone, a camera lens, undiscriminating magnetic tape. They stand between Harry and love, friendship, compassion--between Harry and involvement in what he considers a dangerous blur of unprofessional inquiry.
But the conversation he has deciphered has ended on an unexpected and jarring note. It pricks his conscience and Harry suddenly sees his targets as people and finds himself obliged to decipher meanings, feelings and emotive codes with which he is studiously unfamiliar. Harry isn't sure what he knows about the couple and their impending dilemma, but he knows too much about the inner-workings and the underpinnings of a world where knowledge is invasion. Harry finally decides to intervene, to act to help the couple. And this harrowing, climactic scene shows Harry once again employing an unrivaled expertise in the pursuit of information that he is ill-equipped to interpret. The result is the ultimate discovery that he was never at any real remove from the world--it was always watching him and with a skill far surpassing his own. It is a revelation with which Harry cannot live peaceably and dooms him to his obsessive and ultimately paralyzing paranoia in what is, perhaps, the most haunting conclusion in cinematic history.
I hope you will take my word for it when I tell you that this is Francis Ford Coppola's finest work--spare, focused, minimalist direction, perfectly complementing a singularly deep, rich charge of narrative. And Gene Hackman has never been better.
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