Superintendent Chessari is sent to run a small police station on the outskirts of Rome - a temporary posting in a difficult area, with not much backing and very few staff. His deputy, Lorenzo Corsi, is a youngster just out of the Academy, full of enthusiasm and high principles which clash with the corrupt reality of the streets and the attitude of his colleagues. The small police station seems like an outlying frontier post, a sort of backwater where recruits and hot-heads are assigned to rot. Chessari wants a quiet life, and all he does is set up a few routine operations; following suspects and tapping phones. He tries to avoid making waves that might upset his plans for career advancement. His men, however, are a bunch of loose canons, who are not intimidated by the rules or regulations imposed upon them and at times risk crossing the line of legality.
Acting
Edoardo Leo's exhausted idealism vs Giorgio Colangeli's magnificent slouch
Direction
Costantini captures Roman sprawl as its own suffocating character
Writing
Dialogue that actually sounds like cops talking, not writers showing off
Director
Andrea Costantini
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
This is peak 'commissariato di periferia' cinema—a specifically Roman subgenre about marginal police stations as metaphors for Italian institutional failure.
Andrea Costantini spent months embedded with real Roman police for research; Giorgio Colangeli allegedly based his performance on a specific commissario he observed who literally never stood up from his desk.