A film can be an investigation, a biography, an indictment. Or, as with Francesco Rosi’s "The Mattei Affair", it can be all these things at once and, above all, a chronicle of its own failure. A deliberate failure, one sought out and brandished like a trophy, that elevates the work from civic cinema to a dizzying meta-cinematic essay on the elusive nature of Truth within the labyrinth of Power. Rosi's work is not a finished narrative edifice but an open-air construction site, a dossier whose pages have been intentionally shuffled and some, perhaps the most important ones, torn out forever. The dazzling opening is already a statement of intent: we do not see the death of Enrico Mattei, but its exhumation, the recovery of the wreckage of his plane. The film begins at the end, with the fragments, announcing that its path will not be one of reconstruction, but of perpetual deconstruction.

The structure is a Cubist mosaic, a rhizomatic architecture that rejects temporal linearity to embrace the far more complex one of thought and collective memory. Rosi, like a Borges’s Funes the Memorious trying to order the infinite library of recent Italian history, leaps from the past to the present of the inquiry. He weaves together Mattei’s public life—his battles against the "Seven Sisters," his vision of an energetically autonomous Italy, his charismatic populism—with the attempts, a decade later, to understand what happened on October 27, 1962, in the skies over Bascapè. This fractured editing, which could seem chaotic, is in fact of a ruthless clarity: it reflects the opacity of the real, the impossibility of establishing a clean chain of cause and effect when the players involved are secret services, mafias, international economic powers, and the grey areas of the State. It more closely resembles a Thomas Pynchon novel than a traditional biopic; a tangle of paranoia, acronyms, and suspicion in which conspiracy is not a theory, but the very grammar of the world.

At the center of this vortex, Gian Maria Volonté does not play Mattei: he evokes him, embodies him like a golem kneaded from ambition and mud. His is not mimesis; it is possession. With his sly smile, steely gaze, and the bearing of a Renaissance condottiero transplanted to the era of the economic boom, Volonté renders a figure of abyssal complexity. His Mattei is at once a visionary patriot and an unscrupulous capitalist, a spellbinder who seduces the masses and a technocrat who deals with leaders of the Third World, a Cesare Borgia in a Loden coat who uses corruption as a political weapon and the state oil company ENI as his personal duchy. It is a performance that transcends realism to tap into the power of myth, sculpting an archetype of the Italian man of power: brilliant, centralizing, dangerously indispensable. Volonté gives us not the man, but his historical function, his symbol.

The film, however, takes a further step, one almost science-fictional in its audacity. It becomes a reflection on cinema itself as a tool of investigation. Rosi appears in the film, playing himself as he directs, as he questions real witnesses, like the Associated Press journalist who was first to arrive at the disaster site. This breaking of the fourth wall is no authorial whim; it is the work's beating heart. Cinema becomes a mirror to reality and, in doing so, alters it, questions it, becomes a part of it. The boundary between fiction and documentary collapses, anticipating by decades the cinéma du réel and the hybrid forms of contemporary narrative. We see the creative process, the difficulty of finding information, the reticence of witnesses. "The Mattei Affair" is also the story of a film in the making, an inquiry into the inquiry.

And here, reality outstrips fiction in a way that chills the blood. During production, the journalist Mauro De Mauro, hired by Rosi to reconstruct Mattei's last days in Sicily, vanished without a trace, a victim of lupara bianca. This tragic and unresolved event is not a footnote; it is the final, harrowing chapter of the film itself, a black hole that sucks the work in and projects it into a dimension of unbearable urgency. De Mauro's death becomes the definitive proof of the film's thesis: investigating certain Italian mysteries is not an intellectual exercise, but an act that can cost you your life. At that point, the film ceases to be a mere cinematic work and becomes a piece of evidence, a testimony in itself, an exhibit in the case. The absence of De Mauro weighs more heavily on the screen than any image Rosi could have filmed.

In this, "The Mattei Affair" aligns with masterpieces of American political paranoia like Coppola's The Conversation or Pakula's All the President's Men, but with a substantial difference. While in American cinema the investigation, though fraught with peril, can still lead to a truth (Gene Hackman's tapes, the fall of Nixon), in Rosi's film, the investigation turns in on itself, running aground in the quicksand of an invisible, diffuse power. There is no "Deep Throat" to solve the enigma; there is only silence, red herrings, and death. It is the perfect representation of the "strategy of tension" that would bloody Italy in the years to come. The film is a seismograph that records, with chilling prescience, the tremors of a political and moral earthquake whose aftershocks are felt to this day.

Pasqualino De Santis's cinematography, often grainy, almost "dirty," contributes to this aesthetic of precariousness, this sense of a document snatched from oblivion. The score by Piero Piccioni, by turns epic and melancholic, doesn't comment on the action but expresses its emotional temperature, the undercurrent of greatness and tragedy. Rosi does not judge, nor does he offer solutions. His is a Socratic gesture: he forces us to ask the questions, to peer into the abysses of power, to confront the fact that History is not a linear tale written by the victors, but a confused brawl fought in the dark, whose outcomes are relayed to us in versions that are always partial and contradictory.

More than fifty years after its release, "The Mattei Affair" has lost none of its subversive power. On the contrary, in the era of post-truth and toxic narratives, its lesson is more relevant than ever. It teaches us that form is not mere ornament, but the very substance of the discourse. It demonstrates that the most political cinema is not that which waves flags or shouts slogans, but that which challenges our certainties, dismantles the mechanisms of representation, and leaves us alone with the terrible and fertile weight of doubt. This is not a film about Enrico Mattei. It is a film about an Italy that, like the twin-engine jet of its most controversial public servant, seems doomed to crash just moments before touching the ground, leaving behind only indecipherable wreckage and a single, interminable, deafening question.