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Tuesday, July 23, 2024

Bad Lieutenant (Abel Ferrara, 1992)


Cast: Harvey Keitel, Victor Argo, Paul Calderón, Eddie Daniels, Bianca Hunter, Zoë Lund, Vincent Laresca, Frankie Thorn, Fernando Véléz, Joseph Michael Cruz, Paul Hipp. Screenplay: Zoë Lund, Abel Ferrara. Cinematography: Ken Kelsch. Production design: Charles M. Lagola. Film editing: Anthony Redman. Music: Joe Delia. 

Harvey Keitel's lacerating performance and Abel Ferrara's narrative skill, using a baseball playoff series as a thread to hang his story on, almost made me think that Bad Lieutenant was some kind of good film. But the more I think about it, the more it seems to me a tired reworking of the old motif of Catholic guilt, a kind of feint at creating a Dostoevskyan moral fable undermined by vulgarity. Was it necessary, for example, to cast a nubile young blond as the nun who gets raped, and to provide so many glimpses of her naked?