It is amazing how freely Werner Herzog captures the title of the film's story of Abel Ferrara. A violent movie and mystical, which was worth less to her side scorsesien for his race at the craziest bet, between the challenge and renunciation absolute sacrilege. That side, it seems that Werner Herzog plays with fun in the prologue of the film. It shows us our future lieutenant hesitated before making the leap, hesitating before getting wet to save a renegade from his prison flooded. Just before he shows us, with his friend, bet on the fate of the unfortunate. The skit seems to gather into a caricature issues Ferrara's film, as if to release one last time and do something different.
Snake Eyes
One would think this scene brought as an original sin by a snake that we follow in the waters of the prison (the film takes place right after Katrina). Yet it is an act of bravery that opens the movie, and condemns the same time the character. The snake was not the temptation, he was a snake. The rest of the film works by the lowering of the symbolism of evil (snake, bet, sex, drugs) on an animal any animal, sometimes funny, often absurd. But not just any animal: the approach is reptilian, undulating and the ground.
Reptilien, this Bad Lieutenant - Port of Call New Orleans has the air of being featured in his narrative. No path foregone, no descent into hell pending hello, our bad lieutenant advance as desired. Crime scenes, his reunion with Eva Mendes as a prostitute, paris with the bookmaker friend, equipped with a gang of drug dealers, the snake goes where his instinct door. Obsession of the crime to solve not the spirit of the reptile, he turns around as irrelevant, then infiltrates like a worm in the apple, when it is expecting more.
Nicolas Cage is perfect. His playing of statures vaulted, grimaces and laughs hysterically is crazy enough to carry us into something inhuman. Nothing more natural than drugs for this character: while he flees his grief, he finds its most primitive, more animal. And it's something fun with great pleasure Herzog and daring when he takes his camera to the point of view of hallucinatory alligators or iguana, taking the excuse of the drug. Because there is also a playful dimension in this film, the director playing with the different tones, the black cop to the pure comedy (when the lieutenant is out of the woods is treated surprisingly removed, the characters are hilarious successor to his office).
Beyond good and evil
If the investigation itself occupies only a secondary role in the plot of version Bad Lieutenant Herzog is that it does There is no such obsession with sin was in Ferrara's film. The character played by Harvey Keitel saw his life totally skewed by an act of sacrilege (the rape of a nun), which could help bring the guilty for the worst and the best. No notion of good and evil in this Port of Call New Orleans , simply because these values have no place in the natural cycle that governs the jungle. Like, it makes the investigation is stripped of some of its violence, in cutting, in the colors - for something darker perhaps, but more attenuated.
The absence of any guilt invalidates the very idea of hello to the bad lieutenant. There are redemption and social: the only way for the character of Nicolas Cage is to become captain. And yet, the plot does not install at all in a diagram Linear damnation / redemption, but rather in a ring system that imitates nature. When one might think the character saved, there are these visual rhymes that ooze the idea of an eternal cycle. In its beginning and its end, the film nevertheless has a fence that is of a hallucinatory world, a jungle where the dreamy nature of man is always reduced to his animal - fish in a glass of water to our Lieutenant sitting in front of a giant aquarium. The great Christian film by Abel Ferrara, Werner Herzog made a great wandering pagan.
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