United States, 1972
Directed by Francis Coppola
With Gene Hackman (Harry Caul), John Cazale (Stan), Harrison Ford (Martin Stett), Frederic Forrest (the man in the square, Mark), Cindy Williams (the woman in the square, Ann), Allen Garfield (Bernie Moran), Robert Duvall (the CEO)
“I don’t care what they talk about”. Harry Caul is a wiretapping, surveillance and espionage specialist living in San Francisco. He is highly respected by his peers and it seems that he turns a pretty penny from his secret activities. Delivering high-quality tapes to his clients is the only thing that matters; he is unconcerned by whatever is going on between the people he spies on and what could befall them.
But the conversation he has recorded between a man, Mark, and a woman, Ann, in a public square, under remarkably difficult conditions, is going to upset him and to contradict his claim. The deeper he tries to understand the words, their meanings and the people involved, the deeper he goes into fear, guilt and despair. If the film taps into the thriller genre with an increasingly riveting suspense leading to shocking violence, it is basically the study of an unsatisfied, unsettled, unsure personality.
Harry Caul’s intimate drama becomes apparent as soon as he has wrapped up his tough assignment in the square (uttering in the course his brash statement). First he has a gentle but tense argument with his lodger for the lady managed to leave inside his apartment a birthday gift despite the three locks shutting the door, the alarm and the fact he never told her about his birthday date. Then he pays a visit to his girlfriend but leaves her irked by the mundane questions she asks about him. It seems his job compels him to be cagey and distant, but his clumsy, hyper-cautious behaviors, his careworn looks and his blatant lack of conversational skills and empathy suggest he is deeply ill at ease with himself. A quarrel with his main collaborator Stan over swears and a visit to a church confessional highlights how God-fearing he is. Harry Caul is a solitary man devoured by angst.
It would take a sideshow to his battle over the use of the tapes recorded on the square, an evening spent unwinding with colleagues and girls in his office after a professional fair, to understand a little more about him and to hear him talk a little more. This is a film which takes time to depict the lead character and to instill the anxious and complicated features of Harry’s nature in parallel to the plot. Part of his torment can be explained by a previous job which helped unveiling shenanigans in a trade union but their disclosure led to the murder of a family. Information does have consequences, after all. The forte of the screenplay, written by the 33-year old director, still basking in the huge success of his 1972 flick “The Godfather”, is to keep Harry’s intimate drama firmly intertwined with the plot. The same party ends with the troublesome tapes stolen, leaving him unable to prevent the disaster he thinks in the offing. But what could happen?
“He’d kill us, if he had the chance”. Harry had a hard time to reconstruct this sentence over the background noises and would get haunted by it. The assertive and opaque attitude of Martin Sett, the assistant of the man who ordered the surveillance, the CEO of a seemingly big corporation, fuels the suspicion and panic of Harry, compelling him to keep the tapes, but to no avail. The film reflects his obsession, playing over and over again the shots and sounds of that particular afternoon in a San Francisco public square. When Harry delivers the photographs that were also part of the surveillance assignment he at long last meets the CEO and gets definitely convinced the man could kill the woman, who turns out to be his wife, and the man, who is her lover and an employee of his.
The last part of the narrative begins with his efforts to check what is happening in the hotel room where the woman and the man said they were going to meet again. It is not that Harry, frightened and powerless, is ready to do anything; he stands as a passive witness, an impotent voyeur waiting for his fears to be vindicated. This is a stunning and dreadful depiction of a paralyzed force and helpless empathy. But the second element of this final part upends everything and for the first time since the beginning sounds and behaviors take the back seat as everything is disclosed and settled by the camera jumping from one gaze to another. Just the way the people involved in the drama glance at each other is enough to tell the real story. The third and last element of this finale becomes the absurd though poignant depiction of a man trapped by his own professional paranoia, an astounding coda to the ironic odyssey of a troubled and maddened conscience.
Not only does Harry forget his own rule about ignoring what people talk about but gnawed by his past he sets about preventing a hypothetical crime based on a few words, with a perfunctory consideration for accent and context. The finale’s disclosure just suggests that in their conversation Mark and Ann were granting themselves an excuse for their action and that their plan was fine enough to go ahead; a plan, in retrospect, that was contingent on Harry’s assignment. Harry is not a cause for action; he is part of a machination; and his stubborn willingness to intervene has eventually jeopardized his cherished secretive, independent and protected solitude. He no longer needs to doubt: he is now under real surveillance. His guilt made him err on the wrong side: he is now a powerless individual.
The quarrel, during that evening party, with his top rival in the trade, Bernie Moran, was sparked by a trick this haughty colleague played on him (a microphone hidden in a gift biro); the biggest failure of Harry, his human inability to avoid any trap, had been suggested by an anecdote in a sideshow; what was the cause for irony has become in the end the tragic thrust of this troubling story. The film builds at the same time the portrait of Harry, the plot he is embroiled in and the theme mixing them in a systematically careful and clever way that astonishes in retrospect. It takes a great confidence, or rather a lot of nerve, to center a thriller on the way a few sentences are uttered and linked, or not, and to use it at the same time to portray a depressing and rather unsympathetic character whose psychological suffering is so deep.
Francis Coppola’s talent is undeniable and he pursues his interest for the dark and secretive personalities grappling with a treacherous world he scrutinized in his previous film. Gene Hackman’s performance is a riveting model of pent-up and flailing character, whose difficulty to connect with the world elicits genuine sadness.”The Conversation” also deals with an unpalatable business in a compelling and remarkably well-informed manner, addressing a topical public debate (this was the time of the Watergate scandal) by pointing to the machinations and paranoia that are inherent to the culture of surveillance and espionage.