The Conversation on IMDb click here to read the plot summary
The movie had a very strong effect on me, and I am sure it was meant to have that effect, but that didn't make the experience any more pleasant: it was suffocating. I felt entrapped in Harry Caul's claustrophobic universe, isolated from the normal and lively human beings who dwelt outside, I felt lonely and awkward and very empty.
Trying to pull myself out of it, I could see how the obsessive repetition of the conversation in the beginning was fascinating, how the same words kept shifting meanings, how the reality that was projected upon them kept changing, then again I could also feel Harry completely trapped in a web of signs (made clear from the beginning, when we hear voices distorted through the hearing devices, making obvious their status of signs, not objects - or parts of human beings) whose referential function worked like a brick wall between him and the rest of the universe, and indeed he never broke through that wall. He never managed to touch the facts, he only fell deeper in his semantic pit, from signs to signs of signs and signs of signs of signs, further and further away from the world until all he was left with were scraps of a primordial human existence. I suppose that after a while I will conclude that I loved the movie, now I remember too well the actual difficulty with which I went on through it. It was as if I had to push myself from frame to frame, instead of having the frames and scenes flow smoothly over me.
I wouldn't even really call it unpleasant, now in retrospective - but rather "difficult to deal with". Like the sense of "get that thing away from me!!" I had during Look Back in Anger, which turned out to have tapped some chords deep within me, because a good while after I saw it, while seeing a couple fight for little things, I was interpreting the scene in terms of "the torture we administer to the ones closest to us". I don't even want to think of the chords Harry Caul may have stroke (most certainly something very dramatic pertaining to the deep phenomenological fears of being forever removed from the actual reality of the world)(like I said, very dramatic).
Otherwise, the repeated comment about the old people seemed a bit point-hammering to me, but the hotel scene was totally sinister and fantastic. Aside from the blur and the quiet-then-shocking-then-quiet surreal moments, it was also the one time when Harry actually got somewhat close to the Things behind the Sounds-as-Signs. When he mustered the desire and guts to check on the reality - of course, his perception, his personal recording, was still jammed by his projections.
And the whole super-spy-fair was the one moment I found delightful without ifs and buts, as if going behind the stage of all the Bonds and M-s of the world, to see all that arcane equipment labelled and priced and advertised as if it was kitchen and bathroom gear, not to mention the in-jokes and the possibility of actually using the equipment to spy within the fair.
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