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

For the female role, Elio Petri chose Florinda Bolkan because “her sophisticated yet at the same time animalistic figure, […] very natural” perfectly contrasted with the character played by Gian Maria Volonté “all study and calculation.” She, an idle and beautiful bourgeois; he, the chief inspector of the homicide squad. The relationship is murky, swaying between her sadomasochistic desires and the whiny child within him, fueled by fantasies as well as medical-legal photographic documentation: “…young revolutionary student is suffocated by the routine of the sociology faculty with ten thousand lire notes and raped after death…” he states while photographing her with legs wide apart. “But don’t you get excited when you find them like that?” she asks, amused.

Augusta Terzi, or rather the other; the other person, the other life. The “doctor” slits her throat at the climax of yet another erotic game, the same day he is promoted to the political office. That long-haired and subversive neighbor perhaps slipped under Augusta’s sheets more than once; now that the position allows him, the “doctor” can devote his nerves and emotions to the “repression,” the only cure. His professional delirium overflows beyond the frustrated limits of pettiness and identifies in the young protesters the antagonism he needs as a representative of the law, in the long-haired neighbor of Augusta the adversary-double he humanly needs. But the “doctor” goes beyond; the dichotomy that characterizes him in public and private forms (it is no coincidence that Augusta “is” Terzi) explodes in the principal conflict driving the film, between the policeman and the murderer. The offended and uncertain spirit of the stripped man clings to the clothes of those who represent the Law and Order, of those who are therefore “above all suspicion.” Thus, he scatters the Terzi crime scene with unequivocal evidence of his own guilt, seeking the demonstration of the intangibility of the position he holds, seeking the only certainty: absolute Power.

Elio Petri (“La classe operaia va in paradiso,” 1971) tackles this Kafkaesque digression on power and, surpassing political implications, follows the schizoid progression of a man-symbol within a society that is both a child and a slave to Positions and Principles, in reality and in imagination. Petri does not reveal the ending, demonstrating how his message transcends the particular case; he draws the shutter down while we, outside the “doctor’s” residence, barely see him bow to the commissioner who arrives to question him after his self-indictment. But the dream the protagonist has before the final scene seems, along with Kafka’s closing quote (“whatever impression he makes on us, he is a servant of the law, therefore he belongs to the law and escapes human judgment”), to tighten the arrival of the commissioner in the grip of a written destiny; lying on the bed, in delirium, the “doctor” imagines colleagues torturing him to make him confess his innocence…

The grotesque tone and the impeccable rhythm are nourished by the irresistible nuances of Gian Maria Volonté’s performance (Silver Ribbon), with those words so theatrically institutionalized (“Repression is civilization”) and that immediate and poor Sicilian dialectic aftertaste.

Written by Ugo Pirro and Petri himself, an Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film in 1970, it is a cornerstone of our cinema and probably the most mature and rich of the so-called “political films.”