The Conversation is a thriller written, directed and produced in 1974 by Francis Ford Coppola that investigates, decades in advance, the theme of the relationship between privacy and technology. Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), a surveillance expert obsessed with privacy, works in San Francisco. His apartment is practically bare, so as not to offer hiding places for any interception tools against him, protected by a burglar alarm and a triple-locked door. He does not have a telephone at home and only uses public phones. His office is a corner of a huge warehouse closed off by a metal fence, his relationship with his assistant Stan is aseptic and cold. The only pleasure he allows himself is playing the saxophone to the accompaniment of jazz records. Although he firmly maintains that he is not responsible for the content of the conversations he records and the use that is made of them, the results of an old job of his, which led to the murder of three people, give him feelings of guilt, accentuated by his devout Catholicism.

One day, a man called The Director (Robert Duvall) orders Caul to carry out a particularly technically complicated wiretap: to record the conversation of a couple in the crowded and noisy Union Square. After meticulous post-production work on the recordings, made from various angles in the square, Caul obtains an excellent result, in which the sound is crystal clear but the meaning of the words remains elusive. A premonition, heightened by feelings of guilt related to the past, makes Caul understand that, if he were to deliver the recording to the client, the couple would be in mortal danger. He therefore decides not to deliver the tapes, but they are stolen. MORE INFO
Prices: EZECHIELE CINEFORUM SCREENING 25.17 - Entrance fee €6.00 ​​reserved for members