Rome. A Police Inspector kills his mistress, Augusta, with a blade while in bed, then takes a shower, calls the police to report the crime, and then exits her apartment. He goes to the police station and then returns to the scene of the crime with the police, ostensibly to investigate the apartment. The police question Augusta's gay husband, but the Inspector let's him go. A forensic expert finds the Inspector's fingerprints all over the apartment, but brushes it off since he was there to check the apartment, while the Inspector even admits to his superior he had an affair with Augusta, but he is nontheless not considered a suspect. Augusta's communist student lover, Pace, is brought for questioning. The Inspector has a dream that he confessed his crime to his superiors, but they won't believe him. As he wakes up on his couch, the superiors really enter his apartment.
Not only catchy through its snappy title, "Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion" is a memorable and bizarre satire on two concepts: "Who watches the watchmen?" ("Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?") and the spoiled arrogance of absolute power. The first concept is a meditation on the ultimate arbitrators who can abuse this power, in this case the nameless Police Inspector who oversees the investigation of his own murder (!), but the second notion is even more fascinating and daring, showing how authoritarianism at one point becomes so overconfident in itself, that it is able to explicitly reveal its criminal nature, which will then be ignored, whitewashed or explained away by the masses who are too afraid to admit they are controlled by evil, either due to their passivity or their obedience to the hierarchy of power. The Inspector in the story seems to enjoy exploring how far he can go with his hierarchical impunity, noticeable in the sequence where the gay husband of the killed woman is interrogated at the police station, claiming he didn't kill her, so the Inspector, in front of over twenty homicide employees, says out loud: "Everyone is innocent here. There's only one guilty party... and that's me!", upon which everyone in the room laughs.
Another exchange with a suspect and the Inspector goes like this: "I want my lawyer!" - "We're not in America." - "I want my lawyer!" - "As soon as the law changes, I'll send him to you." At this point, the anti-hero demonstrates his philosophy that he himself is the law, and that he can do whatever he wants. During a speech, the Inspector shouts: "Repression is our vaccine! Repression is civilization!" Another crucial moment appears in a flashback, when the Inspector drives in the car with his mistress, and she incites him to drive through the red light—but as a police attendant stops him and asks for his papers, the Inspector just shows him he is from the police, and is given instant impunity, as the mistress looks at him with excitement: "You can commit any crime you want." The director Elio Petri crafts the film with huge close-ups of faces, sometimes even filmed in telephoto lens, to create a feeling of the weight and intimidation of these figures, though the movie does lose steam in the second half since the script was not that well written, suffering from pacing issues due to its overlong running time of two hours, especially in some didactic moralization. Despite these omissions, "Investigation" is a dark warning on the abuse of power, and the people who allow it to be abused.
Grade:+++
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