Who watches the spies? asks The Conversation, an intimate spy drama directed by Francis Ford Coppola between his epic films. Produced by Coppola’s The Directors Company, the film tackles the dilemma of privacy and the American surveillance society in the spirit of 1970s paranoia thrillers. In San Francisco, the paranoid life of surveillance expert Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is thrown off course when a wiretapping assignment turns into a game of life and death as his shadowy employer and the traumas of his private life become intertwined.
Selected by Sodankylä’s Carte blanche guest, Professor Emeritus Martti Koskenniemi, The Conversation is a depiction, set against the backdrop of the Watergate scandal, of the erosion of individual freedoms and mental health under pressure from superpowers and corporations, amidst the city’s cold concrete structures. Hackman gives the performance of his life as a sensitive, lonely spy who finds solace in playing jazz. Coppola reworks Hitchcock and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), shifting the plot to revolve around the making of recordings. The sensibility of European art films is preserved through long takes and a melancholic undertone. The Palme d’Or-winning The Conversation is elevated by Walter Murch’s meticulous sound design, which turns the viewer into an audiovisual voyeur in a world of paranoia.
Tuomo Marttila