Bad Lieutenant
Chaotic and in your face, Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant doesn’t pull any punches.
"Do you have the right to forgive them? Can you bear the burden, sister?"
a film by Abel Ferrara, 1992
Chaotic and in your face, Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant doesn’t pull any punches. Ferrara’s groundbreaking use of guerrilla filmmaking captures a gritty view of New York’s shady underbelly. Whilst having a budget of around a million, Ferrara often did not gain any permits for the locations he shot in and often improvised scenes and rewrote them during filming. For being so fly by night this film is surprisingly well structured, the backdrop of the fictional Mets vs Dodgers series compiled with the lieutenants increasingly erratic behavior creates a steady sense of building tension throughout the film. Harvey Keitel is fantastic and it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the central role, his dedication to the role was… impressive. I don’t know if the full frontal scene was necessary but it was certainly hard to look away from. It’s not often you see films with a big name actor pushing the envelope artistically and creatively; it’s definitely not a film that would be able to be made today.
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