Please note: This was screened in Nov 2017
Partly inspired by Michael Antonioni's Blow-Up and the winner of the 1974 Palme d’Or at Cannes, Francis Ford Coppola’s immaculate thriller about a surveillance expert who gets drawn into the devious lives of those he eavesdrops on, is a masterful study of paranoia and loneliness.
Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is a San Francisco surveillance expert - a solitary, guilt-ridden and intensely private man devoted to anonymity and ethical neutrality, who goes about his work with a cold professional distance. Usually indifferent to the subjects of his eavesdropping, when tasked by an unknown client with recording a couple, the furtive confidences of the illicit lovers that he captures raises unsettling and deadly questions. Drawn into a murder plot and corporate conspiracy, Caul finds himself tormented by echoes of his past, forcing him to engage with the moral implications of his work.
Released within years of the Watergate scandal, Coppola’s film is a stone cold classic political thriller, perfectly encapsulating the disaffection and paranoia infecting 70’s America in the immediate aftermath of the wiretapping scandal that brought down the Nixon administration. And seen today, this brilliant and haunting film about technology, alienation and guilt, is a chilling reminder in an age in which surveillance is now the norm.