Cinema
Are you sitting comfortably?
Duncan FaHowell
The Conversation Director: Francis Ford Coppola. Star: Gene Hackman. AA' Universal, Regent Street (114 minutes) The Nun And The Devil Director: Paolo Dominici. Star: Ann Hewood. 'X Odeon, Haymarket (93 minutes) I have only seen it once, The Canversation, and once is not enough. It freaked me, caused physical flinches on three occasions while a slow convulsion took place throughout within one's neurocellular fastness, and I wish to hand over some sticky nickel to go through it all again and maybe discover where in this film of elliptical fear from the man who made You The Godfather the seeds of unease are to be found. In the meantime let us say that if Brando's Picture is a high-grade thriller, Hackman's is that and more. 'Kafkaesque' has become a grab-easy epithet among the burgeoning paranoia structures of Post-war technocracy but never before has the cinema so decisively circumscribed the immense and subtle apprehensions we have built into our modern world, the More disconcerting for being both lays and fact. The plot never lays all its cards on the line and the uncertainty is there from the outset.
: Harry Caul is the fastest bugger in the West, working for the CIA or some equally unattractive snoopshow, and Coppola takes us with him on the road to madness as Caul's detachment is eroded by conscience in the face of his work's consequences which include sanctioned murders. It does not matter that the loose ends of the story are never tidily ribboned up by a Perry Mason but dissolve into the inexPlicable. That is part of the disorientation process whereby the director engages our concern, or at least our undivided attention. d This is not a gratuitous tease esigned for those addicted to crossword puzzles although they w..ould enjoy it; the film's fascina;1_°,O is not destroyed if you should !et it slip to your best friend that the :utler did it or that mum is just the COon in drag. In terms of effect the rnparison is indeed with Psycho 2 "12and there is one horrific pheno,0on in a bathroom — yet Copfilm has a far wider applicaL `_ plloe On than the aberration of homi ,... so that when you leave the icture, 'louse well and truly jitLeraen d, there is more to think about n remembering to keep an eye motet Pe if ever you fall asleep in a There are only one or two places where Coppola's aesthetic judgement falls down, posing a transient threat to the carefully constructed mood, but he quickly recovers. One is that hardy annual the dream sequence which is here not only cornily staged with palpitating dry ice but also a distraction because the whole film is something of this. It might have had a structural purpose by leap-frogging us further into the sorcery had it not explicitly returned to 'reality,' but unforunately Hackman merely wakes up to find that his girl has gone (she turns out to have been an agent; as party to Harry's difficulty we too are wondering who is not).
The other happens when he decides that he also is being bugged and determines to root out the offending device. The sequence which ends with his having reduced the flat to shambles begins with Caul coming out very carefully from behind a screen, detector first. It looks exactly like a tennis racket and seems exactly like the preliminary arm of Gypsy Rose Lee.
With the heavier certificate, The Nun And The Devil is much the lighter film. As a piece of sado-masochistic escapism in the veneries of a cinquecento nunnery it is quite watchable, particularly with Anne Heywood on a convincing bisexual death-trip. Since it was shot in Italy the architecture is good and the Fellini-derived costumes boggling on occasions, an extravagant pipe-dream for guilty lapsed Catholics. It's camp from the word go and no one involved with it seems to realise this so that much of the acting is unknowingly appalling, even making allowance for the treachery of dubbing, and the direction about as guileful as Robin Hood on television.
Some girls do have their hair chopped in front of the camera, but there is too much rouge and kohl around for it to be other than pastiche pending parody. It will knock them in the aisles in the Latinate where tits 'n' crosses has long been an infalliable erotic formula, although I cannot see it giving much ' head anywhere else. I loved it.
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