The Conversation Film Review

The Conversation' is one of the best movies I've seen in a very long time.

It is one of those rare films that can leave you utterly shattered afterwards - and it is also a beautiful and very delicate piece of film-making. All in all, it rates beside 'Midnight Cowboy' and The Pawnbroker' as one of my all-time favourites.

Directed by Francis Ford Coppola ('Godfather'), the film concerns precisely what the tital indicates - a conversation. Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), the best 'bugger' in the States, is employed by an undefined bureaucracy to record the conversation of two young people meeting in a crowded park. And the story considers the consequences of this bugging.

But from this apparently simple and naive plot Coppola has built a masterpiece. Through it Coppola probes the moral dilemma of a man who is becoming party to a murder ('I'm not afraid of death. I am afraid of murder').

And he exposes wholesale the vast mechanised industry of surveillance.

Surveillance is a multi-million dollar industry in the United States today, and it has become such an open and accepted part of life that the industry now holds trade fairsl Harry Caul boasts There's no place I cannot bug. There's not human action I cannot record'. And the awesome, crushing impact of the film comes from a realisation that this incredible claim is true. Human privacy is now a myth. '1984' is with us already.

Telephones can be tapped, bugs concealed on person, house or car, microcameras record any human action, and directional mikes capture conversations half a mile away. And the terrible irony of the film is that even the best wiretapper in the States can himself be tapped. There is no escape for any of us.

Coppola has indeed made a masterpiece. The film is full of subtle irony and delicate brush-strokes. Gene Hackman gives a brilliant performance as Harry Caul - a man human despite his inhumanity. The film has so much to say about our society it's not surprising Kerridge held the film back from distribution for two years as 'unfit for New Zealand's moral climate'.

The Conversation' is a film of our times. If ever you get the chance, go and see it. If it does nothing else, it will make you think!

— Ben Smith