Elio Petri
Indagine Su Un Cittadino Al Di Sopra Di Ogni Sospetto

It was December 15, 1969, when the anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli fell from a fourth-floor window of the Milan police headquarters while being interrogated for the bomb that exploded three days earlier at Piazza Fontana. Elio Petri's film had already been shot, and there was indeed an episode of a bomb exploding in front of the police headquarters.

Set in this historical context, "Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion" is a courageous film, as well as being one of the masterpieces of world cinema of which we can be proud (1972 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film).

Courageous because Elio Petri, already a journalist for L'Unità, does not hesitate to denounce the established power, making the first Italian film to dare to cast a shadow on a high-ranking police officer, a representative of institutions that, until then, had been considered untouchable by our censorship. The "doctor" (who is nameless in the film) celebrates his promotion from head of the Homicide department to the Political section by killing his bourgeois, sadomasochistic mistress and deliberately leaving clues at her house to test his own inviolability before the law. Because "...whatever impression he may make on us, he is a servant of the law, therefore he belongs to the law and escapes human judgment," says the Kafkaesque citation at the end of the film. Gian Maria Volonté extraordinarily portrays the character of an official who asserts the supremacy of the law ("Repression is civilization!"), submissive to superiors and overbearing with the weak, childish in his relationship with women, and masculine with subordinates, as well as a holder of a fascist mentality. A pathological case? I believe the director intended to reflect the anomalies of a historically confined cultural fabric.

These were the years of protest, and the country found itself unprepared and confused in the face of the winds of social and cultural change. The same political activists brought to the police headquarters for questioning after the bomb exploded mock each other, anarchists against Maoists. The "doctor" considers himself above this petty humanity because he is Power, and Power always saves itself even when its guilt is evident.

His certainties begin to waver when he makes the mistake of trying to humiliate the anarchist who was intimate with his mistress, the only witness who could incriminate him. But the young man does not denounce him, mocking him because nothing is more rotten than a criminal in charge of the police, and that's what interests the director: the painful awareness of an issue that concerns both dictatorships and sick democracies. So the only option left is self-denunciation: the final dream of the "doctor" lying on the bed waiting for his superiors and colleagues to arrive in their blue cars clarifies everything, or perhaps nothing.

Great Gian Maria Volonté in his psychotic delusion, beautiful and androgynous Florinda Bolkan, stunning cameos like that of Salvo Randone, a tinker directly derived from a previous Petri film (the director's father himself was a plumber), as well as a character like the journalist Fulvio Rinaldi (removed in 2003 from the newspaper Liberazione directed by Sandro Curzi for an article on Cuba). A film that has become legendary also for the music by Ennio Morricone as well as for the whole discussion that veered into the fantastic regarding the physical resemblance of the official played by Volonté to Commissioner Calabresi, who was present in the room from which Pinelli fell.

Despite the years and the strong political connotation tied to a certain period of our history, it is a film that will be eternally relevant because, like all those films that probe the reaction of man when he becomes the Law, it goes beyond genres and so this is no longer just a police drama just as Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" is no longer just a Vietnam film (remember Colonel Kurtz?)