I would like to compare
The Conversation a little bit to Antonioni's
Blow Up (future movie club selection?). I've often heard that both
The Conversation and De Palma's
Blow Out are greatly in debt to
Blow Up and after having seen Antonioni's piece for the first time and re-watched
The Conversation for the sake of this discussion I partly agree. Coppola basically used some of the concept for
Blow Up but, imo, made something personal and almost entirely different of it. Or, he and Hackman made something personal of it.
Blow Up and
The Conversation are really two completely different stories, but they are presented in similar ways or using some similar cinematic or narrative techniques. The open end, the absence of the actual murder (what did really happen?), the fabrication of things in the protagonist's mind...
I don't want to talk to much about
Blow Up since it's not the film we're supposed to discuss. But, shortly put, that film is about everything around us being a fabrication in some way and everything is true if we believe in it hard enough. At the same time, things you were absolutely certain of can also be switched around and you can pretty easily be made uncertain of if they really happened. Typical for Antonioni is also the open end, we don't get to find out what really happened, which is some kind of symbolism for reality: in real life there's often no solution to all problems. There's not a clear beginning and a definitive ending to everything in life. And this is depicted beautifully through the portrait of the protagonist, the photographer, and in the way he tries to solve a murder mystery.
There are many.. I wouldn't call them similarities, rather parallels, between
Blow Up and
The Conversation. But to me Coppola's film is more about a personal downbreak, like you guys allready said, while Antonioi's film is about some kind of state of society (3˝ decades before
The Matrix ).
The Conversation though is actually also both a social and a political comment. It shows how technique and bureaucracy controls the society and how the kind of work that people like Harry Caul does litterally kill people. There is also this religious undertone. Caul wants to do right and is haunted by the past in many ways. Just like the main character in
Blow Up, Caul is piecing together bits of a puzzle. But while the photographer in
Blow Up documented an event that had allready taken place, Caul thinks he can use his skills to prevent this terrible thing to happen. At the same time, if it does happen, it's partly because of him. And driven by what I see as fear of God's wrath, he desperately tries to save this girl. It's about penance. He wants to make up for all the bad things he's done in the past, only to find out that she wasn't the one that needed to be saved.
This is a triumph for Gene Hackman. The way he portraits Caul is fantastic. This sad figure who seems to hate what he has become but at the same time has not a clue what else to be. The saxophone playing shows perhaps a broken dream, a trace of what he once was before society turned him into a conformist. At the same time there is the religious belief. He hesitates before he destroys the statuette of the Madonna, but he loses that battle too...