This movie is a mind bubbling con (versations), which tries to get under the viewers skin like a parasite. It invites you as a viewer to identify yourself with a paranoid surveillance expert whose work finally pushes you right over the edge. This is a character piece of the highest order, filled with betrayal, angst, suspense and surprises. The Conversations disguises itself into the gaunt of an ethical critic towards surveillance and study of importance of privacy.   <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

 

The Director of a large anonymous corporation (Duvall) asks surveillance expert Harry Caul (Hackman) to record a young couple's private conversation. The film opens with Caul and assistants endeavouring to capture the said exchange in a busy square with an assortment of concealed microphones, which embodies the illusion of the malice third party observer as the tool to build the theme of paranoia to the viewer. The cinematography is deliberately planned from a voyeuristic point of view; the audience is always looking.

 

Haunted by the bloody consequences of an earlier assignment, Caul becomes convinced that his ingenious invasions of privacy will put the young couple's lives at risk. The audience is made responsible of peeping into the lives of the "soon to be murdered." The tapes contain the phrase "He'd kill us if he had the chance", and it is this which Harry obsesses over.

 

Finally, when the audience is manipulated through Harry's character into taking action to prevent further bloodshed, their lives are shattered as Harry becomes a victim of competing surveillance, which works as a suggested paranoid schizophrenia to the audience. It's hard to find protagonists as ambiguous as Harry Caul, but the questions raised about the ethics of surveillance seem to be as relevant as ever.

 

However, rather than remaining a dated curiosity, the film serves as a frightening metaphor for our own age; a time of media saturation, corporate hegemony, and the sanctification of hedonism. Given such an environment, privacy vanishes not only as a reality, but also as an ideal. We are suggested to be a race of peeping toms, fascinated by personal revelation and heretofore behind-the-scenes activity.

 

From sexual interaction to bathroom behaviour, few things are kept secret, largely out of the desire to "expose" and to find the true nature of things. Coppola's ability to foresee the ubiquity of surveillance cameras "in the seventies" (at work, in stores, schools, and parking lots), wire-taps and private investigators speaks to his understanding of human nature. Humanity is a race of confession and unwarranted revelation; revelling in our release of dirty secrets and self-serving detail.

 

Still, "The Conversation" resonates today because it suggests an essential truth about Western materialized life – that we 'should' not trust each other. Either out of cynicism or solipsistic arrogance (do not believe we can or should ever know the reality of another), we increasingly seek refuge from input and interaction. Or maybe it resonates from the rational thinking, and submission to the fact that there are only few, if not only one thing, that one can be absolutely sure of, that is that: Where one focuses his minds eye, and what he believes to be the truth, is what determines ones reality. From this point of view Harry Cauls life becomes a self inflicted prison, where he determines his faith through his own occupational and professional ambition. This theme is supported in the movie by having Harry working in an old warehouse corner in a cage.  

 

  

This is an interesting turn of events given the obsession with revelation, but it does in fact exist, with out contradictions and all. Harry Caul, so professional that he is content to pursue sexual relationships of absolute anonymity (even his "girlfriend" is a stranger), is our Everyman. He insists on personal privacy while investigating others; self-righteous in that he insists on moral absolution and detachment; and sufficiently dehumanized to live in a barren wasteland of humourless avoidance (he has the pleasure of a saxophone, yet his apartment is nothing more than a holding cell). He has taken disconnection to its frightening, logical conclusion: seeking for the peace of mind. Any human contact we desire must be surreptitiously acquired - without risk and without confrontation.

 

This movie is a sadly observant character study, about a being who has removed himself from life as the society values it. Harry knows he can observe life dispassionately even at an electronic remove. Harry is a man who seeks the truth, but doesn't recognize his creator role in it but merely as the best dog in the business.

 

The unfortunate thing about this highly valued movie is that it leaves the audience offended and wounded, playing a saxophone into a demolished apartment as a broken man. It did not lift a finger to help the audience: What became the fruit of this strong life experience the character Harry Caul went through?

 

At its best the Conversation was intellectually irresponsible and lazy tale that turned out to become efficient psychological violence against its audience.