The word mystery has several connotations,
but they are largely incompatible for Scotland Yard Inspector Gregory. He
catches criminals—period. Questions of truth and metaphysics are way outside
his comfort zone. Unfortunately, he will be forced to go there in Marek
Piestrak’s adaptation of The
Investigation, which screens as part of Stanisław Lem on Film, the upcoming retrospective survey of cinema based on the work
of the great Polish science fiction writer.
It started weirdly. Various provincial
morgues and funeral parlors started reporting instances of corpses being tampered
with. However, just as Gregory takes the lead on the serial corpse-mover
investigation, it escalates to include full-fledged walking dead. Of course,
Gregory does not believe anything supernatural could be afoot. It is all just
part of some eccentric criminal’s plan to sow chaos and confusion amongst the
populace. He will never accept any outlandish or uncanny explanations, even
when he maybe possibly sees one of the missing dead people riding the bus.
Unfortunately, science does not do him any
favors either. Dr. Sciss is a statistician volunteering his services with
Scotland Yard, but all he offers up is a correlation between areas of reported
dead body activity and significantly low rates of cancer. Almost perversely
(from Gregory’s standpoint), Sciss starts pushing him to think about the problem
in more cosmic terms. As a result, he starts to suspect the statistician of
being his super-villain.
The Investigation is a sly and heady
novel, but it would be a challenge to adapt it dramatically. Nevertheless,
Polish television took at least two cracks at it. Piestrak and co-screenwriter
Andrzej Kotkowski are remarkably faithful to its somewhat loose narrative and
rigorous philosophical inquiry. To make it even stranger, The Investigation boasts a massively funky soul jazz soundtrack by
Włodzimierz Nahorny that feels completely at odds with the film’s Bertrand
Russell-esque logical-epistemological gamesmanship, but holy smokes, does it
ever sound fantastic.
Like
a good soldier, Tadeusz Borowski tries to make Gregory more plodding than
Maigret. However, Edmund Fetting gives the film some edge as the Inspector’s arrogant
but more politically astute commander, Sheppard. As a pseudo-surrogate for the filmmakers,
Sheppard clearly has little faith in the bureaucracy’s chances of saving the
day.
The early 1970s TV film totally captures the look of its era, but Nahorny makes it sound timeless. Although Lem’s short novel was originally published in 1959, his philosophical provocations have not been undermined by advances in forensic science. In short, it all holds up jolly well. Highly recommended, The Investigation screens this Wednesday (11/1) and Saturday (11/11) as part of Anthology Film Archive’s Lem film series.
