Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion: Elio Petri

The true strength of Elio Petri’s Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion is how it keeps the audience confused as to the motives of its protagonist, a police inspector played by Gian Maria Volonté who savagely murders his mistress and deliberately plants evidence pointing to him as the culprit. At first, the sheer ridiculousness of the evidence he creates—he leaves his fingerprints all over her apartment, tells a colleague that he had an affair with the victim, and forces a plumber to report his physical description to the police after revealing himself as the murderer to him—and the baffling lengths the police go to ignore it suggests that the film is a black comedy and Volonté’s character is merely on some darkly perverse power trip. But as the film goes on the audience begins to suspect that the murder was an act of revenge. And by the third act when Volonté begins to beg his fellow officers to arrest and imprison him for the murder, it is impossible to parse his motives. The only logical conclusion is that Volonté was simultaneously fueled by a desire to test the limits of his power as a citizen “above suspicion” in Italian society, his drive to exact revenge against the woman, and a self-destructive, masochistic urge to be punished. Or perhaps it was something else. Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion has more layers than a good novel and only repeat viewings can do justice to them all.

7/10