Bad Lieutenant (1992)
Artisan DVD (region 1)
d. Abel Ferrara; pr. Edward R. Pressman, Mary Kane; scr. Zoe Lund, Abel Ferrara, Victor Argo, Paul Calderon; ph. Ken Kelsch; m. Joe Delia; ed. Anthony Redman; cast. Harvey Keitel, Zoe Lund, Victor Argo, Paul Calderon, Frankie Thorn (96 mins)
Abel Ferrara is the most ferocious and controversial of contemporary American film directors. Harvey Keitel is the most daring and provocative of contemporary American film actors. Their combination in Bad Lieutenant makes for one of the most unforgettably disturbing, raw and intense film experiences ever to emerge from mainstream American cinema: hence, or despite, its consignment to the dreaded NC-17 ratings bin, as have been most Ferrara films.
Bad Lieutenant remains Ferrara’s pinnacle achievement and is Keitel’s riskiest work in sexual aberration since the classic 1970s film Fingers for director James Toback. Keitel’s association with director Martin Scorsese and New York City is well known and often alluded to by Ferrara, but with this film Ferrara proved himself as dynamic a New York filmmaker as Scorsese, although his films often flirt with so-called exploitation terrain a little too uncomfortably for many mainstream critics. Thus, it was no surprise that Bad Lieutenant created something of a critical furor when it was first released, as did Keitel’s involvement in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs around the same time. Although many praised Bad Lieutenant’s daring characterization, there were just as many who decried the film’s sly treatment of aberrant sexuality and its uncomfortable link to Catholicism and ideas of blasphemy and religious psychosis.
Bad Lieutenant stars Harvey Keitel as the eponymous character, a plain clothes police detective. At first we see him at home and taking his two sons to school, in the car using profanity as if it were nothing. Once the kids are dropped off, he immediately snorts cocaine and begins his day.
Over the course of the next few days, he will sink further into a personal abyss of drugs, corruption and religious despair and the film unblinking follows his descent into hell on Earth. He tries to steal evidence, briefly considers a female murder victim with an erotic gaze and bets heavily on the ongoing World Series, getting ever further into debt. He learns of the brutal rape of a nun but seems cynically unaffected by it, to the surprise of even his hardened associates. However, when he peeks through a hospital door and sees the naked nun in a post-trauma medical exam he may be sexually excited by the forbidden sight. He next detains two teenage girls in their car and forces them to imitate sexual acts as he masturbates outside their window. He goes to Church and virtually collapses. He talks to the nun but cannot understand how she can be so forgiving, the talk of following Christ’s example triggering a hallucination that impels the man towards what he may perceive in his now full-blown paranoid psychosis as a form of redemption. He searches for the rapists, knowing that his life may depend on the last game of the World Series.
Bad Lieutenant is a behaviorist study of one man’s descent into a moral abyss to the point where he experiences a kind of hallucinatory epiphany and perhaps believes that even such a bad man as he can find redemption.
Although it is explicit about the man’s continued moral degradation as a lapsed Catholic and is full of Catholic iconography, the film’s most disturbing suggestion, and an arguable religious transgression, is that Keitel is turned on by the sight of the naked nun as a sign of all that is forbidden to him – perhaps even, as a slight against God, the last taboo in his systematic descent into despair. Thus, his subsequent behavior with the two young women is a surrogate activity as he can barely deal with his own violent sexual impulses. It is not only that he was attracted to the forbidden (a naked nun) but that he was also attracted to the prospect of raping her, of violating what is sacred and for a moment put himself in the place of the rapists. His psychosis in effect subsequently spirals out of control as he cannot reconcile these feelings as they are perhaps a new low even for him. He doesn’t speak to his wife and is more concerned with the baseball scores than with his duty as a law enforcement officer – indeed he is rarely seen to do any real police work. Still, the issue at the core of his psychosis is his seeming inability to comprehend the nature of the forgiveness that obsesses him above all else.
He simply cannot understand how the nun can forgive the rapists who had done such a volatile injustice to her and by so doing to Christ himself. Yet, when Keitel is driven to vivid hallucination, he at first curses the Christ he sees before him and then appeals to Him for forgiveness.
As an answer perhaps, he discovers the identity of the rapists and the test then becomes what he will do to them, especially when it is clear that he has to some extent put himself in their place by sexually desiring to violate the nun. His subsequent treatment of the rapists when he apprehends them speaks volumes about the Christian code of forgiveness, an ethic that Keitel struggles with against his own conception of due retribution as justice. In his own mind not only a bad man but a surrogate rapist of sorts, it is forgiveness that he seeks and his action with the actual rapists speaks of how he would like to be treated. If finally following a Christian example is he achieving a kind of redemption or is it merely a psychotic form of displacement? In his mind at least he seems to believe in the possibility of his own redemption and subsequent critical analysis has sought to see a Christ allegory in the film’s final stages, following the hallucinatory epiphany: the question at the root of his psychosis is not only can Christ forgive Keitel but can Keitel forgive himself. Bad Lieutenant is one of the finest films ever made about redemption.
DVD DETAILS:
Vision
The visual transfer of this extra-ordinary movie is thankfully technically of a high standard throughout. It has a luridly natural grittiness with a sense of heightened everyday perception, especially in an ironic golden sun and the use of red lights to signify the descent into a moral abyss. Ferrara’s visual style here has a raw verite, behaviorist approach, emphasizing real time and thus achieving a documentary style rawness as the character moves through a harsh and crumbling urbanity. Shots taken through windows and involving reflections are effective but the most stunning shot is that where he peeps on the nun, his point of view allying the (male) viewer with Keitel’s own transgressive and even blasphemous desires: it is a deliberately shocking use of point of view. The use of wide angle lenses adds distortion to scenes and in the latter stages captures his disorienting paranoia. Colors are bright and the editing is at its most jarring during the stylized rape sequence. For much of the film, Ferrara lingers on Keitel as he gets high and crumbles psychologically, physically naked at one point. Much is made of shots favoring Keitel driving around in frustration as he follows the baseball game on his car radio. The church scenes have an appropriate use of mists and the use of light in the hallucination of Christ suggests its importance in the character’s mind as he has perhaps “seen the light” again.
Sound
The sound transfer is equally effective. From the opening credits, there is a sly use of a radio baseball commentary voice over, which is used throughout the film for punctuation, as it is the baseball series’ progression that seems to give the character’s life structure. With a suitably oppressive urbanity, the sound mix makes for a well-sustained authenticity, stressing the crispness of seemingly minor sounds (the details of addiction for instance), intense and spaced-out voices and the use of a popular love song as an ironic counterpoint to the escape in drugs and alcohol. The song signals the idea of the escape from a lonely world and the idea of God’s love being eternal. The sounds of television work to create a convincing background in some scenes and there is a sense of overheard sounds and voices filtering into consciousness. One rare quiet scene in a vandalized Church is broken by the sound of a police photographer; a cruel reminder of the profane’s intent to destroy the sacred. Listed as Dolby surround, the transfer is always subtly anchored, at times capturing the subjective numbness of inebriated perception as sound as well as vision chronicles the character’s flight into drug-induced self-indulgence. Likewise, there are effective uses of sound traveling through space to tie into the notion of a journey, at best in the scenes of a car in motion – the use of open sound is often striking.
Special Features
In the way of special features are a cast and crew list with biographies and filmographies and several barely informative text pages of production notes. The comparative lack of extras is a major disappointment on this otherwise excellent DVD release of a stunning movie.
