THE CONVERSATION (1974)
Direction and Screenplay: Francis Ford Coppola
Cast: Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall, Frederic Forrest, Allen Garfield, John Cazale, Cindy Williams, Michael Higgins, Elizabeth MacRae, Teri Garr, Harrison Ford
Gene Hackman, The Conversation
By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica
There are some works of art that are both obviously derivative and just as obviously inferior to the originals. Those simply ape the earlier work, tweak a few minor things, and try to pass off their theft as an "homage." The Conversation (1974), written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola and winner of the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or, is not one of those minor works.
Though it has an indebtedness to Michelangelo Antonioni's brilliant Blowup (1966), The Conversation does not merely ape that film's existential dilemma of an accidental photograph possibly cluing its lead character into murder. Instead, Coppola's film probes far more deeply into the mind of Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) in an attempt to show what might cause a man to misinterpret reality to suit his own psychological needs. [Note: Spoilers ahead.]
Another major difference is that the tale in Blowup is wholly accidental, whereas The Conversation is built upon an outgrowth of Caul's deliberate and paid-for actions, for he is the leading West Coast surveillance expert hired by the mysterious Director (Robert Duvall) of a giant corporation to spy on his wife, Ann (Cindy Williams), and her lover, Mark (Frederic Forrest).
The Conversation opens around Christmastime, with Caul and his entourage listening in to the conversation of the two lovers as they stroll in downtown San Francisco's Union Square. The opening zoom-down from a sniper's eye level focuses on a mime (Robert Shields) who is annoying people in the square. The fragmented bits of conversation Caul eventually pieces together leads him to believe that the couple is being set up for murder by his employer. (As an aside: The Conversation's opening scene was shot by Haskell Wexler; the rest of the film by Bill Butler, who took over after Wexler and Coppola had a falling out.)
Caul is a lonely man who plays saxophone and jazz records in his apartment. Outside his window, an apartment house across the street is being systematically torn down, just as his life soon will be. Despite Caul's professional expertise and paranoia about his own privacy (he has three locks on his apartment door), a female neighbor knows his birthday, and when he gets home we see that she — or someone else — has gotten into his apartment and left a bottle of wine. His mail has also been snooped through.
Even his girlfriend, Amy (Teri Garr), knows his habits — such as spying on her — yet feels excluded from his life. So does his assistant Stan (John Cazale), who eventually leaves Caul's employ to work for his East Coast competitor, William P. Moran (Allen Garfield).
All that pressure, in addition to lingering memories from an assignment he did years ago, weigh on Caul's mind. In that particular case, legendary because no one knows how he obtained the information, the facts dug up apparently led to a triple murder. With that on his mind, Caul — who also happens to be a practicing Roman Catholic — is an utterly unreliable "narrator." The viewer cannot take all that occurs in The Conversation as the absolute truth.
As in Blowup, there seems to be a murder Harry seems to witness it when he takes a room next door to the Jack Tar Hotel's room 773. He listens in to what is happening, and hears what appears to be violence.
There are some subjective shots, all hidden by frosted glass. We see blood, and Harry believes the young wife has been killed. The references to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho are clear. He later breaks into the room and finds no evidence of the murder until he flushes the toilet and blood wells up. (A few years later, a similar sequence would be used in Stanley Kubrick's impressionistic The Shining, and more recently in Stephen Frears' mystery drama Dirty Pretty Things, in which Chiwetel Ejiofor's hotel clerk discovers a human heart in a toilet.)
Now, if the murder really did occur in room 773, it would have been impossible to remove all the blood. Caul even runs his fingers under the rim of the bathtub stopper, but can find no trace of blood. That the blood wells up only after the flush is just too symbolic to be real in the interior of the film's universe.
Besides, we get no confirmation from other sources that any of that is real. Caul tries to confront the Director, but he is tossed out of the building by security. He then sees the young wife, still alive, in a car.