Life.Culture.Discovery.

Flashback: Elio Petri’s Oscar-winning tale of crime and bureaucracy

A brilliant performance by Gian Maria Volontè anchors this hard-hitting drama about corruption and police brutality, as he plays an inspector who wants to be caught for killing his mistress

2-MIN READ2-MIN

Gian Maria Volontè as Il Dottore in Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion.

Published: 9:02pm, 10 Sep 2016Updated: 9:02pm, 10 Sep 2016

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, made by Italian director Elio Petri in 1970, is a unique film. Superficially, it’s an unusual, occasionally decadent, sex-crime story about the murder of a top policeman’s lover. But that’s only a McGuffin for Petri’s deeper social, political and psychological concerns.

The film is a scathing, hard-hitting political tract about state corruption, police brutality and fascism, as well as a penetrating psychological analysis of a mind gone awry. It also takes a philosophical look at notions of justice, and the difficulties of achieving a just society in the face of human fallibility.

Despite its intellectual aims, Investigation is never ponderous or polemical, being leavened with a deathly black humour and some bizarre, semi-surreal scenes. A best foreign language film Oscar winner, it starts with the chief inspector of the homicide squad (who is not named, but referred to as “Il Dottore”) killing his debauched mistress and littering her apartment with clues that point to his guilt.

Leaving the homicide department to take command of the Gestapo-like political police, the psychologically disturbed Il Dottore attempts, in an equivocal fashion, to get arrested for the murder. But a mixture of incompetence, fear, disbelief and unwillingness to see the obvious, means that his ex-colleagues in the homicide squad fail to bring him in for the crime. Will Il Dottore have to confront them directly with his guilt – and even then, will they accept it?