Italian director Elio Petri's Investigation of a a Citizen above Suspicion (1970) is peculiar variant on themes in Kafka's The Trial. Stylized and nightmarish, the film inverts the situation in Kakfa's novel -- Joseph K believes that he is innocent but everyone that he encounters accuses him of a nameless, mortal crime. In Petri's film, a police commissioner knows that he is guilt of murder, but everyone proclaims him to be innocent. Joseph K. is always accused; Petri's corrupt and tyrannical bureaucrat, although a murderer, is always proclaimed innocent.
If you approach, Investigation with innocent eyes (as was my case), the Kafkaesque character of the film emerges slowly -- at first, the audience is lulled into interpreting the movie as a highly abstract crime picture, a police procedural in which the authorities are investigating a crime committed by their boss. But within a half-hour, the viewer begins to grasp that the film isn't realistic and is a kind of parable featuring abstract and austere sets (underground wire-tap bunkers with hundreds of workers, offices decorated with huge, elaborate paintings and vast brutalist office structures). The plot involves increasingly desperate efforts by the titular protagonist, the police chief, to prove himself guilty. These efforts fail and, at the end of the film, the Commissioner (sometimes called the Capo) is forced, seemingly against his will, to sign a "Confession of Innocence". The movie ends on a freeze-frame adorned with a quotation from Kafka that the version of the film shown on Amazon unhelpfully declines to translate out of its Italian text (of course, itself a translation from Kafka's German). I didn't like this film, perhaps, because of its bait-and-switch character -- the audience expects a gritty detective show, but, in fact, experiences a rather gloomy and politically tendentious allegory. The movie is shrill and ugly -- it's mostly huge wide-angle close-ups lensed at about ten inches from the subjects' faces. There are a lot of tracking shots through the big, mostly empty sets and the film is full of bizarre details -- the Capo tortures his suspects by making them kneel on concrete and forcing them to drink from pitchers of salt-water; when he's confronted about his crime at the end of the film, he eagerly gobbles down a handful of salt, perhaps, in recompense for his own sins. The texture of the film is uniform from beginning to end -- it features characters that are always haranguing one another in bellowing voices. Everyone accuses everyone else of crime or sedition -- the villainous protagonist is surrounded by villainous lackeys. The Capo's enemies are lurid caricatures of Red Army Brigade terrorists. There's a suitable macabre musical score by Ennio Morricone, a sort of tick-tock march for bell-whistles and industrial widgets that is the most engaging thing about the film. Otherwise, the movie is intentionally repellant.
In the opening scenes, we see the Capo, a slender, well-dressed stiletto of a man, hovering around a weird Art Deco apartment in which a seductive witch in filmy negligee lives. This is the Commissioner's mistress, the wife of a homosexual interior designer. The Capo plays perverse sex games with her in which she impersonates the victims of murders that her boyfriend has investigated. (In one flashback scene, she covers her head to mimic a decapitated and decomposing woman found dead on a beach.) The Capo's girlfriend enigmatically asks him "how are you going to kill me today?" He responds: "I'm going to cut your throat." And so he does while they are having sex. This time the thrill is real -- she ends up dead. The Capo, then, intentionally plants clues implicating himself in the killing -- he places threads from his green silk tie in the woman's fingernails, leaves his fingerprints all over the place, and tracks blood around on the soles of his distinctive shoes. Back at his office, the Capo has been promoted from police chief to Director of Political Intelligence, a higher level job that involves wire-taps on apparently everyone in Rome and all sorts of Fascist thuggery. Repeatedly, the Capo provides clues that he has murdered the woman, Auguste Terzi. But all his sycophantic lackeys ignore those clues or just wink at them -- they immediately go to work pinning the crime on the homosexual husband, and, when this fails, on the regime's political opponents. The Capo's motives are obscure. We don't know if he's acting from a sense of arrogance -- "I am completely above suspicion," he declares after one of his confessions is ignored -- or out of an obscure sense of guilt in which he may be seeking punishment. In any event, the Capo's henchmen ignore the evidence before their eyes. As we learn, Mrs. Terzi was sleeping with a political radical, a sort of college-spawned terrorist who is arrogant and a pretty loathsome figure also. This enrages the Capo and he tortures the terrorist's associate mercilessly but when the actual subversive is interviewed, the role's are reversed and the Commissioner essentially prostrates himself before the man. In the end, the poor Capo is reduced to summoning all of his colleagues, a group of black-suited Keystone Kops who ride around in a Keystone Kop car, and explaining to them the murder that he has committed. But this just results in the Kops making him sign a "Confession of Innocence", the disquieting note on which the movie ends. The movie is grim, cheerless, although sometimes to the point that it is unintentionally funny. For instance, after the bombing of the Palace of Justice, some government offices, and American Express, the bureaucrats gather for a conclave is what looks like its taking place at the bottom of a concrete silo -- where is this and why are they gathered here? The movie consists entirely of ranting tirades in which one man bellows at another. Now and then, the Capo makes speeches that would impress Hitler with their vehemence and savagery: all criminals are subversives and all subversives are criminals, the Capo maintains at one point. Everyone to whom the Capo confesses ends up getting implausibly framed for the murder and the bureaucrats all conspire against one another. The movie is impressive (it won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film) but not enjoyable in the slightest. Gian Maria Volonte is effective as the Capo who struts through just above every scene in the film.
The movie was recently restored for the Cinema il Retrovata festival in Bologna. Amazon streaming is promoting the film, but apparently with the prediction that no one will be able to watch this thing to its end. As the movie progresses, the subtitles lag farther and farther behind the speeches on screen. And this is a problem because the movie is very, very talky. We end up with something accidentally Kafkaesque. People speak at length but the subtitles first show up 20 seconds later when someone else is talking. Simple commands such as "Please shut the door" are incomprehensible when projected in the middle of someone's long (untranslated) political harangue. When I was in college, art-houses showed films like Renoir's Rules of the Game or Ozu's Tokyo Story with white subtitles that were largely invisible in the brightly lit shots -- the subtitles were purely notional, white on white. The 16 millimeter prints were faded, disfigured with amateur splices and the sound was like someone talking over a poor telephone connection. (I first saw Metropolis is a church basement, projected ineptly, with a soundtrack that consisted of music from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring just repeated in endless loops.) Someone, probably Amazon, has spent a fortune to restore Investigation and it looks great -- but if the subtitles are shown a half-minute after when the words they are spoken the effect is worse than useless. (Until I saw restored versions of The Rules of the Game and Tokyo Story, I couldn't see what all the fuss was about -- the movies were faint shadows of their original design; maybe, I would have liked Petri's film a lot more if the subtitles hadn't been so utterly destructive of the movie's intended effect.)
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