Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans Directed by Werner Herzog | Written by William Finkelstein
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I know plenty of people who like Bad Lieutenant, but I don’t know many who take it at face value. Keitel’s cop—referred to only as “the lieutenant”—is a fallen Catholic assigned to investigate the brutal rape of a nun inside a church. As shot by Ferrara, the attack is a confused cocktail of prurience and spiritual outrage. A statue of the Virgin Mary is tipped onto the floor, and there’s a quick cut to an actor playing Jesus, who roars with pain on the cross. Yet the rape plays out under kinky red lights, with a gratuitous crotch shot as the two punks pull down the nun’s panties. After bending her over the altar and taking turns, they violate her with a crucifix and steal a chalice for good measure. When Keitel visits this poor woman in the hospital, he spies her laid out nude on the examining table, and in the person of actress Frankie Thorn she’s the hottest nun in the movies since Jennifer Jones in The Song of Bernadette.
Herzog may be one of the world’s greatest living filmmakers, but he doesn’t seem to take himself all that seriously: five years ago he played himself in the absurd mockumentary Incident at Loch Ness, which satirizes his reputation as an intrepid adventurer. So I’m not really surprised that, after a career heavy with historical dramas and globe-trotting documentaries, he’s decided to experiment with something as crass as a cop thriller. Cage suggested moving the story from New York to New Orleans, an idea embraced by the producers for its substantial tax breaks and by Herzog for its artistic potency in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The breakdown of order following the storm lends currency to the idea of a cop who can’t control himself, and Herzog revels in the city’s polyglot, premodern ambience. Cutting some of Finkelstein’s scenes and inventing numerous new ones, he’s managed to take a shamelessly commercial project and open it up into a Herzog film.
