After Francis Ford Coppola. Plot summary A surveillance expert records a conversation between a young couple with grave consequences. Film review It's hard not to talk in superlatives about Francis Ford Coppola's output in the seventies: The Godfather saga, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now are all considered masterpieces of modern cinema, all for different reasons. Of these classic titles, The Conversation is the least known. This is hardly surprising because it is more of a character study in the European sense than it is a rousing American epic. The Conversation was made solely on the succes of The Godfather but was in fact written a couple of years earlier. Coppola borrows heavily from Antonioni's Blow Up for the central mystery in the story but adds a couple of layers of meaning to the central character of Harry Caul: the movie is rife with repeated images and themes, most of them relating to the see-through aspect of Harry's job. Gene Hackman gives an amazing performance as a professional eavesdropper with an overly developed sense of paranoia and mistrust as a result of his profession. His unease around people is tangible and his self-inflicted isolation is depicted in wordless scenes of incredible subtlety. He doesn't bare his soul to anyone, and when he does in an unguarded moment the repercussions are immediate and almost painful to watch. His sense of security quickly evaporates as he becomes obsessed with the possibility that his own tools may be turned against him. The actual conversation is only revealed a little bit at at time and its meaning remains ambigious right until a final plot twist worthy of Hitchcock. Coppola chooses a very naturalistic and down-to-earth style in portraying the world of Harry Caul. The camera follows Harry like an eavesdropper: static shots inside his apartment show him wandering in and out of the frame or sitting in the corner of a frame. Lots of memorable scenes during the recording of the conversation in the square, the surveillance experts convention (which in fact, was not shot on a set but at a real surveillance convention happening at the time) and the finale in Harry Caul's apartment are particularly outstanding.