“Reality is caricature”

…Unmaking Fascism #2

There is a short list of movies that I enjoy enough to easily watch on repeat and never get bored. Elio Petri’s Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970) is one of these. It is a political satire about the authoritarian practices of the Italian police at the time, but it also feels far deeper than just satire. Petri shows the hypocrisy of power in a clever, entertaining, and shocking way that is applicable to any time period or place. At the start of the first Trump administration in 2017, I began thinking that the president reminded me of someone.Then it hit me that he acts just like the protagonist of Investigation, “Il Dottore”, an unnamed police inspector. Actor Gian Maria Volonté goes full asshole in his performance, showing how powerful men can be intelligent enough to superficially appear dignified, while wallowing in man-child behavior just outside of public view. The movie represents our contemporary politicians but is also distinctly of its time. As Evan Calder Williams mentions in his essay included with the 2013 Criterion disc release--“The film appears psychotic and caricatural in large part because the Italian state was so itself, as it sought neither to pacify dissent nor mask its power.” (14) The era known as The Years of Lead kicked off just before the release of Petri’s film. It was a time of fraught political violence by the right and the left, suppression of student protests, and barefaced police brutality. The New York Times’ J Hoberman quotes an interview with Petri in which the director states, “Reality is caricature.” With the rogues gallery of villainous icons picked for the Trump administration so far this year, no three-word statement could better sum up contemporary America.

In the opening sequence, Augusta Terzi (Florinda Bolkan), the inspector’s kinky girlfriend asks him, “How will you kill me this time?” To the surprise of her and the audience, he goes ahead and slits her throat, really murdering her. We are repelled by this jarring act, only to become drawn into the story immediately after as we watch the inspector intentionally leave evidence of his crime all over the place--fingerprints on the bottle of Fernet, bloody footprints all over the apartment, and a blue string from his tie caught in her fingernail. Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion is the closest thing to an anti-giallo to come out of Italy. Instead of a series of murders committed by an unknown assailant who is revealed at the end through detective work, we see a man commit a murder and then try as hard as possible to incriminate himself, with all the detectives refusing to notice the obvious connection.