Abel Ferrara
The Bad Lieutenant (Il Cattivo Tenente)

In life, you need certainties. For the ambiguous protagonist of this rotten cult movie, directed by Abel Ferrara in 1992, the only certainty is that in the Major League Baseball playoffs, it is unthinkable that the Mets, trailing 0-3 in a best-of-seven series, could make a comeback.

The life of this New York police lieutenant is so precarious that the gradual crumble of that initial certainty causes him to collapse. We shouldn’t imagine a vase shattering upon hitting the hard ground. No, that would be too easy: it's a slow drowning, heavy and relentless; a struggle in quicksand, as if an invisible hand were gripping his ankle, dragging him down with an ever-tightening hold. He desperately seeks redemption once he knows he's pushed to the wall.

The protagonist's existence is one of apparent toughness. A gratuitous and ostentatious toughness shown through his movements, his language, his tone of voice, the impassive features of his face, masterfully captured with the use of close-ups. A brutal violence meant to mask an anguish he’s unable to release.

And so our Bad Lieutenant prowls hungrily, like a rabid hyena, crazed through the dingiest corners of the city, searching for the fears and torments of others to try to numb his own suffering.

The first sequences take place outdoors, in broad daylight. We barely notice, but gradually the light fades. We relive the self-destruction of a man in four scenes of almost unspeakable power.

The first shows him with a prostitute, with a sweet romantic song as the backbone, while the protagonist, completely drunk and desperate, emits his first groans of NERO. It’s a desperate, overwhelming, off-kilter dance, with him totally naked, his penis hanging, trying to find relief in the lightness of a melody: but the heaviness of his soul is just too much.

In the other scenes, what strikes us is instead the total absence of a soundtrack. The camera movements are minuscule, the extremely high quality sound makes us feel his despair in every breath, in every barely perceptible movement, in the sound of his preparing a hit and shooting it into his vein, in how he gasps, or while he masturbates in the street like a mangy dog, screaming his madness by obsessively repeating the same phrase.

The turning point of the film is the rape of two adolescents against a nun. The sexual assault takes place on a church altar, and the Sister is even violated with a crucifix. The nun’s forgiveness of her aggressors, despite having recognized them, is utterly inconceivable and destabilizing for the protagonist. And it’s here that the need for redemption, punishment, and purification starts to creep into his sick mind.

He must process this conviction, and indeed it’s an imperceptible change, in which, together with despair, a glimmer of humanity can be seen. The meeting with the raped nun finally shows him the path to follow and, with immense difficulty, torment, and contradictions, he tries to take it.

The work heads toward its end and closes sharply and categorically in the only way possible. Framing these final minutes are the violence and groans of the protagonist, destined to remain impressed upon the viewer’s mind. Atrocious groans, as though he were trying to vomit out all the NERO that had invaded his mind.

I thought back to the final scene, also without a soundtrack, of the very recent “La Zona di Interesse” in which the protagonist (the head of the Auschwitz concentration camp) stops to vomit, and I believe it is a tribute to this film.

An iconic cult movie for a disturbing but necessary work, which in just under 100 minutes, manages to strike the viewer in such a powerful and unique way that I don’t think much more needs to be said.

I can’t conclude without emphasizing that the work was written by the director and Zoë Lund, who appears in one of the film's most iconic and realistic scenes, playing herself. In those five minutes, she prepares a hit for the lieutenant, which they inject together, and as they do so, there’s the abyss, there’s a hellish chasm, but there is also redemption and hope. The blend of these elements is the result of the magnificent work by Lund and the director, who create a formidable script for a film made immortal by Ferrara’s direction and Keitel’s masterful performance.