‘Vampires are lucky, they can
feed on others. We gotta eat away at ourselves.’
Abel Ferrara’s ‘Bad Lieutenant’
is shocking, disturbing and uncompromising piece of personal cinema about a cop
without a name. His rough, bleak and messy existence is purveyance of self
destruction and absolute anarchy around. He’s the cop gambling heavy bets, he’s
corrupt, he’s thief, he’s hooked junkie and alcoholic, he’s the sinner. He’s in
mess of no returned and stuck to a big fix when he constantly failing to pay
betting debts to loan shark and doubling it to recover and ending up to lose
further. He doesn’t mind taking physical advantage of young girls on duty or
stealing from department store and yet on verge of his self destruction he
encounters a rape case of nun which draws him towards the redemption.
If Nicholas Cage had played one
of unsurpassable doomed alcoholic method act in ‘Leaving Las Vegas’ than this
is the unsurpassable doomed junkie method act you’ve ever seen in form of
Harvey Keitel. Undoubtedly this is one of his absolutely stunning and
uncompromising performance. Watch his body language, expressions and
temperament in almost each and every scenes, I must say this is one hell of
method act. There’s many scenes that can’t wipe out just due to Keitel’s
intensity of performance.
The film bears strong religious
perspective of sin, confession, repentance in the later half. I haven’t seen other films of Ferrara and it’s hard to
say whether this is his film, since Keitel’s performance overshadows
everything. I don’t recollect the name but one of fellow cinephile told me to
watch Ferrara
version when I praised Herzog’s take on it starring Cage. With full respect to Werner Herzog, I must
say that ‘Bad Lieutenant’ is belong to Harvey Keitel only.
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