THE CONVARSATION - Francis Ford Coppola (1974)

Monitore and be monitored... Slowly gradating and dragging into the plot, but much more intensifying and suggestive. At first very banal monitoring of an uninteresting conversation of two persons in the park slowly changes to proper thriller. Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) has to choose between ethics and job and he tries to solve this situation.  Gene Hackman is as famous as Francis Ford Coppola as director. It´s a portrait of the character and the era which are connected by absolute lost of freedom, the fragility of personal life. Harry Caul is listening lives of others, but he is denying his own life, in a fear that he could be listened and betrayed. He is like a chameleon in a flat full of impersonal stuff, with a mistress who knows nothing about him, with a colleague who can´t establish friendly relationship between them, with a telephone number nobody knows. Nevertheless he cannot escape the paradox hunter - prey in the moment when he tries to behave like a human and prevents a tragedy. The conversation is a particular and abstract metaphor of modern civilization as an era, when everybody can listen and manipulate, but everybody is fragile and vulnerable. Coppola uses visually sophisticated form of full shapes, he works complexly with narrator (different angles of retrospects) and fantastic sound track.