Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970)

To say the truth, I am not crazy about political parodies/dystopian political dramas like Costa-Gavras' Z. It's just something about these movies that fail to move me. Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Elio Petri) is a film like this: I think I can guess at what the parody is supposed to be about and the meandering, swirling aesthetics is enjoyable but still - the film didn't make much of an impression on me. The story contains no mysteries and no thriller-like suspension; instead already from the get-go we know the main character, a high-rank police inspector, to be an arrogant killer. He kills, but nobody would accuse him of anything, so he just goes on with his business. The film follows this megalomaniac police inspector in his quest to prove that he can do ANYTHING. He's above the law - he IS the law! He intentionally scatters evidence all around him, but nobody would take it as evidence. What I liked about the film was how it played around with the concept of proof and evidence: what does it mean to see something as a proof if nobody would take it as such, if nobody would even pay any attention to it? A second meaning of proof also emerges when we realizes that the inspector is trying to prove something to himself; he doesn't seem that cock-sure, after all, or there are strange cracks in his demanor. It is as if the main character is bearing a cloak of invisibility, like Gyges, but he is constantly trying to test people's attention, to make them catch sight of the cloak. Unsurprisingly, there are a few scenes in which leftists are accused of the crimes committed by the authority. Some of these are rather funny, while other are just .... predictable. Investigations .... is soaked with cheesy details: silk ties, grimacing faces, over-the-top music (by Ennio Morricone). Even the lines are wildly stylized: "Repression is civilization!" The lust for power and control on display is dressed in an almost Deleuzian form of machinic desire: frantic and productive and excessive. The entire society starts to appear like a machinic fantasy, a fansty about control but also a fantasy about revelation.