The film, presented at the Cannes Film Festival on May 14, 1992, signed by director Abel Ferrara, well known to cinephiles, but still virtually unknown to the general public
New York. After the rape of a young nun (Frankie Thorn) by two thugs who then vandalized the church altar and stole a golden chalice, a corrupt police lieutenant (Harvey Keitel), drug addict, alcoholic and gambler begins investigates what happened and in the meantime tries to recover a large sum of money that he lost by betting to double on a new game of the national baseball championship. Shocked by the idea that the victim (by whom he himself is sexually attracted) knows the perpetrators of the violence but does not want to report them, the man tries in vain to persuade the nun to confess the identities of the aggressors to him to avenge the crime he has suffered, while its existence takes a road of no return in a self-destructive mystical madness. Drugged and frustrated, he begins to lose one bet after another, continuing to double the stakes without having the money to cover it, despite the threats from his bookmaker; and after yet another confirmation that the nun unwilling to accept his offer of revenge, he ends up asking God’s forgiveness for his misdeeds and having a false “vision” of Jesus descended from the cross. Thanks to which I will be able to find the rapists first and, almost immediately after, his death.
When The bad lieutenant was presented at the Cannes Film Festival on May 14, 1992 in the prestigious Un Certain Regard section, the director Abel Ferrara was already well known to cinephiles, but still almost unknown to the general public, especially Italian, despite his filmography up to that moment (made exception for The Driler Killer, 1979, a descent into hell horror splatter prodromal to much of his later cinema), had been released in our cinemas in near real time. The (few) cinephiles who had rightly already elected him as a cult filmmaker had long begun to compose the puzzle of his extreme personality and his tormented and questioning cinema. In “The Angel of Vengeance” (Ms. 45, 1981), “Fear of Manhattan” (Fear City, 1984), “China Girl” (id, 1987), “Beyond Risk” (Cat Chaser, 1988) and especially in the monumental, Scorsesian, desperate, nocturnal and wavering “King of New York” (id., 1990), Ferrara had already drawn with strange and changing shapes (often due to the needs of producers who did not yet see an Author in him) a path in which, beyond the style, all the themes with which he and his shadow screenwriter Nicholas St. John emerged clearly [al secolo Nicodemo Oliverio] they had measured themselves from the very beginning of their career, which began under pseudonyms (Ferrara signed himself Jimmy Boy L.) in none other than in the world of porn with the now legendary “9 Lives of a Wet Pussy” (1976, don’t ask us for a literal translation) . Set in gloomy and degraded urban scenarios, his films desperately sought a poetics made up of will for redemption in a world dominated by any possible corruption where the “perdition” of the characters always concealed a yearning for the purest sacredness. The souls staged by Ferrara were subject to the most classic of psychoanalytic translations: the torments of the protagonists were his.
The bad lieutenant, made in a moment of total bewilderment and addiction to all kinds of drugs and of angry obsessive-compulsive delirium for Christian redemption, the manifesto of one of the last possible and “true” rebellions of the cinema of the twentieth century. It is certainly one of the last truly “extreme” forms of cinema before the beginning of the dictatorship of the politically correct and the collapse of the need to use cinema as an exorcism of the curses of living that had held sway for at least a quarter of a century until then. Disturbed by the enormity of the subject’s implications and the psychophysical precariousness of his companion, Nicholas St. John for once refused to collaborate with him, even going so far as to try to boycott the making of the film; and legend has it that the screenplay, based on a song of the same name by the director (but also on the real rape of a nun told by a memoir of the real policeman Bo Dietl) and co-signed by the partner of the Ferrara era, the actress Zo Lund (then died of an overdose a few years later), changed on set overnight or even didn’t even exist. The rough and feverish aesthetics of the images of The bad lieutenant blurs the boundaries between documentarism and staging (many sequences, such as the final one of Keitel shot in his car, were “stolen” in a perverse form of candid camera without notifying the “extras” – despite them – of the making of the film ); the setting in a New York still haunted by that squalor to which Mayor Rudolph Giuliani will declare a zero tolerance war a few years later gives a hellish dimension (despite the copious harvest of Christian symbols that emerge in most of the shots) to the meta shots -neorealists dominated by the hand machine. But Harvey Keitel (no less “doped” on the set than Ferrara was; and on stage practically from the first to the last sequence) the real sacrificial body / engine of the entire film, the “thermal” variable of a story in which the concept of “acting” disintegrates to leave room for a sort of confessional transference, eliminating the very process of identification and representation.
His sordid nihilist and nameless character, protagonist of shocking sequences such as exhibitionistic violence on two girls, the full nude to the tune of “Pledging My Love” by Johnny Ace (a song not coincidentally already used by Scorsese in “Mean Streets”) or the heroin “hole” without stunt double (scene cut from the version distributed in theaters and present only in the complete homevideo editions), monumental and disturbing in its adherence to the director’s affliction, to his desperate request for help and clarity, to the will of search for a glimmer of grace in the predestination of damnation. Her is a performance similar to body art, the exposure of a vulnerability to the emotional zero degree, between howls and screams and crying and contortions and internal torments similar to those of a frightened child or a wounded animal. A promanation / expiation, perhaps, also of his Judas of “The Last Temptation of Christ” (again Martin Scorsese; and another admirable example of autobiographical abyss of the conflict between flesh and spirit); or a disavowal in the gray area and without the Tarantinian irony of his slightly previous Mr. White in “Le iene”, killed by the police after having finished in cold blood the “traitor” representative of the law. “The bad lieutenant” a “monstrum” film, in the Latin etymological meaning of “prodigy” and at the same time a separation and reference from the usual categories: a transcendent experience that forces the viewer into direct contact, uncomfortable and mysterious even in its own way mystical, with an elsewhere that the cinema of the new millennium has rarely offered more. A point of no return even for Ferrara himself; who will sign other masterpieces (we remember at least “Snake eyes” / Dangerous Game, 1993; “The Addiction”, 1995 – which seems to spring from the famous monologue on vampires of “The bad lieutenant -;” Brothers “/ The Funeral, which would deserved the Golden Lion stolen by Neil Jordan’s “Michael Collins” in Venice 1996; or the underrated and labyrinthine “Blackout”, 1997), but that will never come close to that so total dimension of pain, catharsis and madness.
May 12, 2022 (change May 12, 2022 | 08:06)
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