The Conversation

Colour, 35 mm
USA, 1974, 106 min
Section: New Hollywood

Synopsis

Harry Caul is a renowned wiretapping specialist who carefully guards his privacy. He does not however do anything to stop a certain conversation he managed to tape for an important client under particularly difficult conditions from reaching his own ears. From the inexplicit snatches of dialogue between a man and a woman meeting for lunch in a San Francisco park, Harry puts together, piece by piece, a story of secret love pursued by murderous marital jealousy. The neutral listener becomes an engaged participant, while failing to think about the risk it brings or the possibility that everything might just be different than he assumes. How long will he be able to keep up the illusion that his own life is safe from manipulation? This artfully constructed and technically brilliant take on Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup (1966) ushered in a wave of critical films on moral corruption and the impossibility of getting at the truth, and almost symbolically paralleled the Watergate wiretapping scandal. The movie garnered a number of awards, including Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

About the director

Francis Ford Coppola (b. 1939, Detroit) has, for decades, personified the energy of the new creative generation. As a producer, screenwriter, and director he paved his career with dazzling successes and flops. He started out as a protégé of Roger Corman and a valued screenwriter, having won an Oscar for the drama Patton, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner (1970). The “minor” personal films he made such as The Rain People (1969), The Conversation (1974), Rumble Fish (1983) or The Rainmaker (1997) balanced out from time to time his more ambitious and costly projects, the prototype of which was the Vietnam war drama Apocalypse Now (1979). While it was the Godfather mafia trilogy that brought him fame (The Godfather, 1972, The Godfather: Part II, 1974, The Godfather: Part III, 1990), his colourful record of working with genre and with bold experimentation is also confirmed by the musical The Cotton Club (1984) or the horror film Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992).