Injustice is Blind

By Mark S. Goodman

Whatever impression he makes on us, he is the servant of the Law. He belongs to the Law and is not answerable to human judgment.

Kafka's observation provides a fitting epilogue to a brilliant, complex and vagrant film, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion. Can a police chief --or any official with direct power --commit any atrocity that piques his fancy and get away with it? Italian Director Elio Petri (The Tenth Victim, A Quiet Place in the Country) raises a disturbing question that seems to defy satisfactory answer.

The Roman inspector (Gian Maria Volonte) is a remorseless homicide cop who also happens to be a homicidal psychopath. The sexual subcurrents of his sickness are brought out by his mistress (Florinda Bolkan), who is entranced by his bloody profession. The film opens on his last visit to her. "How will you kill me this time?" she coquettishly asks. "I'll cut your throat," he replies. And so he does, as they make love. With deliberate clumsiness, he steals her jewelry (but not her 300,000 lire), leaves his fingerprints in the shower and bloody shoeprints. Then he takes two bottles of champagne back to the office to help his colleagues celebrate his new promotion to head of the police department's political intelligence division.

Brutal Authority. Inexorably, he is driven to involve himself in the murder investigation. Like Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, the inspector longs to be discovered. Yet his perverse desire is not born of guilt; he is demonic rather than Christlike. "I left clues everywhere to prove that I am above suspicion," he muses, and the film's terror lies in the department's blind refusal to analyze the obvious clues before it. The inspector himself is obsessed with mutually exclusive notions: that he is above suspicion, and that the forces in power are infallible and must eventually find him out.

The pace and pulse of Citizen are reminiscent of Costa-Gavras' magnificent Z. Its nearly surrealistic aspects--as in a fantasy in which his inspection-department cronies refuse to allow him to plead guilty--are rather shaky recalls of Bunuel. Indeed, the film's fundamental drawback is that Director Petri is intent on political statement: the terrors of police fascism. The inspector cries: "Repression is civilization," and such crude political commentary detracts from solid psychological drama.

This is only a flaw in an icy gem. Petri's calculating direction is too swift and merciless to allow the clutter to become insuperable. Volonte, meanwhile, invests the role of the cold, internally rent inspector with brutal authority, giving credence to the proposition that if justice is blind, so is its terrible opposite.

Mark S. Goodman

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.