The Mattei Affair

Co-winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1972 (it shared the prize, and its lead actor, with Elio Petri’s The Working Class Goes to Heaven), the suspenseful, cerebral The Mattei Affair is one of Francesco Rosi’s key works, and has been compared to Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane and Costa-Gavras’s Z for its first-rate combination of investigative biography and political thriller. Oil czar Enrico Mattei — “the most powerful Italian since Augustus Caesar,” according to Time — died in a 1962 plane crash that has never been satisfactorily explained. In Rosi’s speculative, semi-documentary drama, Mattei — marvellously well-played here by Gian Maria Volonté — is a charismatic man whose business smarts and leftist politics may have made him numerous enemies: Charles de Gaulle, the Italian government, the Mafia, the CIA, Italian fascists, various European multinationals. The film offers no Oliver Stone/JFK-like solution to its central mystery, but presents various hypotheses in dispassionate, incisive, highly compelling fashion — offering, along the way, edgy investigative insight into the dynamics of capital, power, and corruption in postwar Italy. “Essential viewing . . . An astonishingly powerful conspiracy thriller” (Time Out). Colour, 35mm in Italian with English subtitles. 118 mins.