The Conversation (Coppola, 1974): Prince Charles Cinema, 12pm
This is a 35mm presentation and is also screened on April 12th. Details here.
Time Out review:
Francis Ford Coppola’s sparse, prescient thriller is inner,
rather than outer-directed film about the threat of electronic
surveillance, conceived well before the Watergate affair broke. Acknowledged
as the king of the buggers, Gene Hackman’s surveillance expert Harry
Caul is an intensely private man. Living alone in a scrupulously
anonymous flat, paying functional visits to a mistress who plays no
other part in his life, he is himself a machine; and the point Coppola
makes is that this very private man only acquires something to be
private about through the exercise of his skill as a voyeur. Projecting
his own lonely isolation on to a conversation he painstakingly pieces
together (mesmerising stuff as he obsessively plays the tapes over and
over, adjusting sound levels until words begin to emerge from the crowd
noises), he begins to imagine a story of terror and impending tragedy,
and feels impelled to try to circumvent it. In a splendidly Hitchcockian
denouement, a tragedy duly takes place, but not the one he foresaw; and
he is left shattered not only by the realisation that his soul has been
exposed, but by the conviction that someone must have planted a bug on
him which he simply cannot find. A bleak and devastatingly brilliant film.
Tom Milne
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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