My favourite Cannes winner: The Conversation

http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2015/apr/22/my-favourite-cannes-winner-the-conversation

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Many of the best films I’ve ever seen I first saw at Cannes. Few of them won awards, though. Look back through the annals and what stands out is how random many of the Palme d’Or winners are; a trend only increasing since the introduction of the one-prize-per-film rule.

People bellyache about how the Baftas and the Oscars are dished out, but Cannes de-democratises the process yet further, then serves it with a side of fruitcake. Rather than 5,000-odd industry types, you have fewer than 10, all heavily invested; a weird little clique dominated by the chair (can you imagine trying to shout down both Coen brothers?).

Evidence #1: Elephant not Dogville in 2003. Evidence #2: Fahrenheit 9/11 over The Consequences of Love or Oldboy the following year. Also last year’s victory for Winter Sleep over Leviathan. And I’ll lob a hot potato into the pot: Blue is the Warmest Colour should not have beaten Nebraska, The Great Beauty or even – whisper it – Behind the Candelabra the year before.

Anyhow, back in 1974, they got it bang on (admittedly, it looks a slightly ropy programme). What makes the victory more unexpected is that The Conversation’s brilliance hinges on one of the few ways in which Cannes can let its premieres down: they get lost in translation. When a movie is screened with two types of surtitles, to 20+ nationalities, you know a good section of the crowd are going to skip some of the subtler stuff. Doing interviews after The Great Beauty, I was conscious that the detail about the particular type of Florentine flaneur being mocked had gone over my head. Watching Mr Turner, I didn’t feel the special ludicrousness of Ruskin’s lisp played to full comedy with the Slovaks in the house.

In Francis Ford Coppola’s film, it all comes down to intonation in one sentence: “He’d kill us if he got the chance.” That’s the line PI Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) eventually deciphers, after much expert knob-wiggling and wire-adjusting, on the audio of a conversation between a couple he’s covertly taped. The commission to do so has come from a mysterious company director in San Francisco; when the director’s flunky (Harrison Ford) seems suspiciously eager to get his mitts on the tapes, Harry holds on to them and gives them a closer listen. He stumbles across the crucial moment, his imagination unravels and so the latent moral queasiness of “the best bugger on the west coast” lurches up and spills over.

One of the reasons I find The Conversation so rewarding is what it says about misconstrued stories: Harry pieces together the fragment in ways which make sense to him. Sure, The Conversation is a commentary on cinema, but also on the way curiosity leads us to plug gaps with the wrong colour. It cautions you against trying to construct motivation from snatched moments and your own prejudice. It tells of the ways in which intimacy and suspicion intersect, eavesdropping and emotional dependance fester and infect.

These days of course, it looks a little different. You could write a book about The Conversation’s relationship to emerging tech, reassess it in the light of such a wholesale overhaul to surveillance and privacy. But it’s not quite a prescient film – its key chime, if there is one, is Watergate, not NSA – and what touches me is Harry’s age-old psychological torment. He bears the guilt of the culpable outsider. He is silent witness to atrocities he knows are likely going on next door, but is paralysed when he tries to act.

As the film shows, what we imagine are the consequences of our inaction can be almost as dreadful as the reality: Harry in that hotel bathroom, making the bubbling discovery (a scene nicely referenced in Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things).

Coppola shot this between the first two Godfathers, on the condition that the second would definitely happen. It has little of those movies’ magnificent macho strut, nor the epic mania of Apocalypse Now, for which he won his second Palme d’Or, five years later. The canvas is macro, the edits are tight, the instinct to erase not to sprawl. I find it the easiest to relate to of all those films; odd because, on rewatch, it shortchanges everyone female. None of the women come out of this well – always more agents of exploitation than victims of Harry’s projection – and even the best are incapable of fathoming his hang-ups.

So what else is wonderful about this film? Everything. Its sparseness as a thriller means it’s absolutely unpatronisingly, despite such heightened intelligence. Humane, too; a strange combination, but a neat one, and, as it happens, exactly the same as you get in person from the film’s editor (and spirit animal), Walter Murch.

The screenplay is as exact and focused as Harry himself: from the establishing shot, tracking the circus mime through the crowd, through to details like Harry’s caul-like mac, and the times you see him foggily, through something not quite as translucent as it ought to be. The camerawork, nodding to but not mimicking CCTV, has a mechanical pan that unsettles. That white noise jitters your ears, shakes your soul. And I think it’s pretty sharp, too, on how people treat highly-trained pros in a service industry (Ford’s smoothie insouciance here is flooring).

When I saw it more than 10 years ago, that ending – Harry unable to find a bug that’s infected his apartment, sitting with his sax, floorboards up, icons smashed, career in tatters, safety in danger – struck me as tragic. Later, it might have put me in mind of the last reels of Bug, William Friedkin’s 2006 adaptation of the Tracy Letts play, with Michael Shannon and Ashley Judd ripping their skin off in a motel room, in search of something they’ll never find. I might have even described it as Kafkaesque.

It doesn’t now. It feels upbeat, exhilarating even. Harry plays unaccompanied, with a fluidity and absorption lacking before. Caul isn’t having anything quite as trite as a rebirth. But the man who stuttered he wasn’t afraid of death no longer looks frightened of life.