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The eavesdropper in the transparent coat, the paranoia decade personified. The self-described "freelance musician" (Gene Hackman) is a surveillance expert first seen as an extra in a high-angled panorama, San Francisco's Union Square at lunchtime, pesky mime and all. The latest assignment follows a furtive couple (Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest), "a nice, fat recording" is the simple goal gradually unraveled as their dialogue is deciphered. The snooping virtuoso is painfully recessive, pious, hidden behind locks and alarms—comfortable amid his paraphernalia, alone with his saxophone. Failure and guilt are the fears, assistant (John Cazale) and mistress (Teri Garr) are pushed away for asking questions. Doubt lets his guard down, he's duped by the obnoxious rival (Allen Garfield): "The bugger got bugged, huh?" The cerebral voyeur, the understanding of technology and the misunderstanding of people, Francis Ford Coppola's abstruse self-portrait. Spools of tape like spools of film, out of electronic bleeps and distortion emerges an exchange that separates victims from conspirators. (The dense soundscape virtually lends Walter Murch co-auteur credit.) A meticulous impersonality, a cultivated distance collapsed in the middle of a party with a hired floozy in a darkened studio. "I am not afraid of death. I am afraid of murder." Antonioni's Blow-Up is the acknowledged basis, there's also a hint of Melville's Le Samouraï in the concealed recorder and Lumet's The Anderson Tapes for Watergate miasma. The fog of dreams, the antiseptic mind suddenly like a bloodily overflowing toilet, the melancholy piano that envelops it all. Even the shadowy tycoon (Robert Duvall) is as wounded as everybody else. "It's curiosity, goddamn human nature." The computer's eye from 2001: A Space Odyssey is brought to bear on the antihero in the rubble of his lair, destroyed or freed? De Palma takes over the lacerating inquiry with Blow Out. Cinematography by Bill Butler and Haskell Wexler. With Michael Higgins, Elizabeth MacRae, and Harrison Ford.
--- Fernando F. Croce |