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Rating: The siren of a Carabinieri squad car echoes through the streets of a city, while a little girl hops across the road with a ball: a sudden stop, but she passes by as if nothing happened. The law enforcement officers begin to make stops, and they will continue to do so throughout the film.
Thus begins a vivid, melancholic, sharp, and bitter depiction of the miseries, vices, and watered-down virtues of an Italian town in 1969, more precisely a Venetian town that an attentive observer recognizes in its squares and streets, first as Vicenza and then as Bassano del Grappa; in reality, the town in the film is a combination of the two. The environments, moods, and vicissitudes of the two cities intermix and chase one another, overlapping with the thoughts of the film's protagonist, Commissioner Pepe, becoming the fabric of his dreamy diversions, soliloquies, anxieties, and the lucid and foresighted internal exploration he conducts on himself and the people around him.
These two Venetian centers, fused for cinematic purposes into an imaginary town, represent the emblem of any area, which a savvy realist tale and without false morals paints as the keeper of secret sexual sins, venial but also repugnant, that interrupt the peaceful working and existential rhythms of the inhabitants, from the canonical eight hours to Sunday mass. Just as Bonvi's Sturmtruppen were the symbol of all armies of the world and their adventures, this town is the catalyst of the anxieties, urgent answers to unasked questions, the perspectives of any village in the world.
Commissioner Pepe, an excellent Ugo Tognazzi, is a melancholic, intelligent, and disillusioned police officer who finds himself dealing with an investigation into local misconduct, a thankless task he would absolutely like to avoid ("...this is a small town, we've always followed the policy of turning a blind eye..." - he reveals to his colleagues), but then, pushed by his superior, he confronts it decisively, finding himself immersed in a world made of condominium prostitution, a boarding house run by corrupt spouses, homosexual urges curated by an "eminent clinician," the daughter of the prefect who supports her lover with the money she earns, a nun who seduces her dance course students; the pursuit of pleasure is described by the commissioner from the start with the analysis of his narrating voice, "a city that makes the sign of the cross" and hides its little perversions behind a facade of religion. Around the commissioner, small figures move, blending with the city's streets, within the chiaroscuro interiors of the homes, public spaces represented with the taste of a vignette. They are the vice commissioner Cerveteri, unaware of his thirty-year-old sister's prostitution, Commissioner Pepe's lover, Matilde Caroni, who often leaves for Milan to "do a bit of mischief," the obsequious carabiniere who lives on expedients to keep his family going, such as arresting the drunkard Garibaldi to tend to the station's courtyard garden.
But the quintessential supporting actor is the invalid Nicola Parigi (excellently portrayed by Gaetano Maffioli, a well-known gastronome) who lost the use of his legs in wartime on July 20, 1943, and since then roams the city's streets in a motorized wheelchair, shouting his despair to the citizens, warning them of a new conflict, even despising the lotteries he hears on evening television ("...mangy dogs searching for the golden bone, searching for the golden bone...") and sending anonymous letters to the police (I am a good citizen and try to help the poor police, he tells the commissioner) denouncing all the rampant corruption.
In this descent into the underworld, the commissioner carries with him much indignation, but also a touch of compassion for his suspects, and a dose of pragmatism in his investigations; his love affair with Matilde is also revealed to be ambiguous in the eyes of the audience, as they meet in a bookstore pretending not to know each other: he too is part of that world of thin hidden plots that blend with the winter fog at the foot of the Berici Hills. Ettore Scola's masterful direction resembles a Svevo novel, where a fervently represented Trieste was the keeper of the inner exploration of the characters, sometimes listless, sometimes desperate. In this film, Scola uses close-ups, long-shot framing, the commissioner's daydreams, and postcard views of the two towns to take his time, to slowly immerse the audience in the city's quagmire, or rather in the daily double-faced living, clean on the outside and dirty on the inside. An outstanding musical score by Armando Trovajoli, very '60s, then reinforces the images, highlighting both the frantic action scenes and the initial images depicting the commissioner in his daily commute to work.
The commissioner's journey will bring him face to face with the police chief, who, while appreciating his work, reproaches him for excessive zeal, decrying his failure to exclude the untouchables from the list of suspects: under the commissioner's astonished gaze, the police chief recites the reasons of state: "...the sister of a vice-commissioner, (his deputy), the son of a count who employs 2000 workers, an eminent surgeon, a high school professor (esteemed humanist), the daughter of the prefect...sure, they are guilty... but does it pay to create such an upheaval...?" The ritual is complete, big fish must be removed from the net and small fish roasted instead. The commissioner disagrees and, in doubt, burns the dossier, requests a transfer, and closes the film in a complete pessimism that may never end. Walking down the train station avenue, after turning his back on his corrupt lover who returned from Milan, the commissioner looks at us exclaiming jokingly: "Why? Are you lions?"
The answer is left to the audience.
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