The Conversation (1974) – Formalist
As Francis Ford Coppola’s long-awaited Megalopolis premieres next week at Cannes, I thought this week we’d have a look at Coppola’s long-loved film (that turned 50 last month), The Conversation. I will be the first to admit that I am not honestly entertained in an escapist enjoyment way by films from the early 1970s, it’s just not my era. However, they do leave lasting impressions on me and provoke all sorts of thoughts with their nuance and ambiguities and finer attention to craft, and so I am pleased that the Review Roulette wheel landed on Formalist as our lens for analysis this week in a spoiler-free review. (Note: If you have not seen The Conversation, I do recommend seeing it spoiler-free).
The Conversation is a film about Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), a man obsessed with his own privacy while making his business invading that of others. As a freelance surveillance expert, Harry is the best in the country, a savant at wiretapping, bugging, and enhancing recordings to make out every word of others’ private conversations. Centring on one particular conversation Harry records, the film explores the inner turmoil of a man’s emotional walls put up to distance himself from others while simultaneously silently screaming for a true intimate connection with another person. Ultimately, The Conversation is a slow-burn of a film reminiscent itself of a stake out in which you must be vigilant of every small detail in order to see the big picture and make sense of the unspoken, inflected, and implied conversations had both orally and physically throughout.
Viewing this film through a formalist lens, I want to focus on two scenes: the opening credits and the moments leading into the closing credits. The film opens on a view of Union Square in San Fransisco on a busy weekday around lunch time. There is jazz playing loudly from a radio. There are performers busking, drawing crowds. There are sounds coming from every direction and there are people going about their days. At first the camera is wide, covering the whole park, but then slowly, as if moving through water, the camera begins to home in on one spot. As the audience, we are not told what to focus on. We see this loud, busy, active park and hear overlapping cacophonous sounds that we later understand as the obstacle Harry had to overcome to record the crucial conversation had in the square during all of this. As the camera pans down and zooms in, we hear the jazz more clearly and our eyes are drawn to a mime.
Mimes don’t make sound. Coppola’s choice to focus in on the mime at the very start of the film absolutely captivated me for the rest of the film as a masterclass in misdirection and I still didn’t see the twist coming. Our senses are overloaded in that moment as Coppola fills our ears with layers of unpredictable jazz and chatter and our eyes with unfocused stimuli and movement, and then gently suggests we focus on the deepest tones of Duke Ellington and the eye-catching figure dressed in all black. And we do, because that’s how cinema is supposed to work, we follow what we’re shown and trust until proven otherwise that we saw what we were meant to see and heard what we were meant to hear. Harry’s work relies on these same principles of trusting one’s instincts and senses that what is heard is heard correctly and objectively while disregarding the potential for the subjective mind to play its tricks on those senses. For a film called The Conversation, we are first told to follow the mute mime.
The final scene of the film, a particularly famous sequence, brings the jazz and the mime full circle but in a far more sinister and simplistic way. We see the jazz player playing alone in a chair as the camera pans the room three times, searching for the metaphorical mime that makes no sound and remains hidden, an oppressive reminder that a sense of security is just as subjective as the physical senses and even more devastating when the illusion of its objectivity is shattered.
Coppola’s use of jazz specifically throughout the film is a beautiful addition to the score. The unpredictable nature of jazz, the emotional lead its players can take, and the escape it provides from the routine of the players’ lives all echo the wider themes in the film. Harry is silently desperate for a personal connection, to openly love someone, to impress another, to be seen as himself and appreciated and not judged, but he actively blocks himself from those connections. He longs to give in to those emotionally intimate desires but the only time they really come through is when he plays his saxophone in the privacy of his own home, an act which is violated by the mime in that closing scene. Jazz plays several roles in this film and acts as a multi-layered character in itself, similarly to the mime, as both a metaphor and a facilitator of misdirection and distrust.
I appreciate The Conversation even more now having written this review than I did when I opened my laptop. There is a profound artistry to this film and I highly recommend it as a just brilliant example of how to construct a film in a way that the form is so carefully and intricately a representation of the larger themes and plot unfolding simultaneously.
Because I’m Never Done When I Say I Am
Contemporary History
I failed in my role as an American film historian to pick up on the significance of the moment in which The Conversation was made until a ways into the film. As a film about surveillance and bugging, I was thinking more about modern issues with the NSA, Patriot Act, social media data mining, things in that realm until I was blindsided by Harrison Ford’s character sneering that Gene Hackman is a “wiretapper”. The film came out in 1974, the same year the Supreme Court decided United States v. Nixon and Ford pardoned the disgraced president for Watergate. Coppola would have most likely already been in production when the Watergate scandal broke, so deeper research would definitely be necessary to know how much of the script and plot were adapted for that historical moment, but the timing is fascinating regardless. Additionally, one sleazy character played by Allen Garfield remarks that he wiretapped the presidential nominee 12 years prior and cost that unnamed candidate the election. It is reasonable to assume that that campaign would have been the 1960 election and the candidate tapped and sabotaged was no other than Slippery Dick himself.