The Conversation

Buy This Item The Conversation by Paramount  Available from Amazon  $9.99  on 11-14-2008     Outstanding psychhological and spiritual film that, because of the content, is basically timeless. Hackman (Caul) is an expert on private surveillance work.A sordid past has cost him 3 innocent lives in the !960's while doing govermental work. His contention circa 1975 is that he is a private contractor who delivers his "bugging" work for a fee. Paranoid that he's being watched, and totally convinced that he's stumbled across another potential murder, he hasn't the courage to contact the police, for fear (real or imagined) of his own safety and reputation. Instead he freezes,and contents himself with eavesdropping on the homicide. Only afterwards does he involve himself in the surprising conclusion, thereby aiding his subsequent psychiatric breakdown.Throughout,Hackman gives a first rate performance, and Coppola's production and direction are, well, what one expects from him. Look for baby faced Harrison Ford; you may have trouble recognizing him. Reader Reviews After the success of the first Godfather picture, Francis Ford Coppola could do anything he wanted. He chose a very loose adaptation from the leading character and basic scenario of Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-up, to create this both exciting and provocative thriller about a surveillance specialist who finds himself involved in a murder plot. In Blow-up, a fashion photographer takes a picture in the park and comes to believe that he may have evidence of a murder. The difficulty is that the visual evidence is not conclusive -- it demands interpretation and no amount of manipulation can overcome the ambiguity of the image. Here, Harry Caul uses elaborate techniques to record and collect fragments from what seems to be an innocuous conversation, but that he begins to suspect will be used in a murder plot. Just as Blow-up became not only a film about a photographer and a murderer but also a meditation on vision and on the cinema -- so The Conversation is a rich and sophisticated film about the nature of sound and the interpretation of sound and in particular about the way in which sound is captured for film. Apart from having an excellent jazz soundtrack, the film is very subtle in its sound editing. It opens on a crowded park, and we immediately become aware that the sound of the crowds and the music and the individual people and the cars is recorded sound. We hear the subtle distortions that come from blowing up sound recorded from a distance, and that in a finished soundtrack would be removed. It turns out we are both watching the crowd and watching and listening in as a couple in the crowd is being recorded through a number of highly specialized surveillance techniques. Later in the film, we are reminded at several points and in several ways that the sound in a film is an artificial construction and that it is independent of the visuals. Some scenes that initially seem like they are part of the normal exegesis of the film, turn out to be reconstructions based on how certain characters heard and interpreted recorded sound; in other scenes the aural artifacts we have become familiar with show up to indicate that we can never be sure whether the sound is just part of the film or whether it is being recorded by a third party. This is an excellent film on a number of levels, as a political thriller, as a portrait of a paranoid individual, but also as a meditation on the nature of sound in film. Definitely one to watch ... and listen to.

The Conversation Available from Amazon Price: $9.99 Updated on 11-14-2008.

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