The Seoul Times

The Nicolas Cage starrer, “The Bad Lieutenant – Port of Call: New Orleans”, which premiered at the ongoing 66th Venice Film Festival, has created bad blood between the movie’s director and Abel Ferrara. The 1992 Ferrara’s cult classic, starring Harvey Keitel, runs very much like “The Bad Lieutenant”, though its German helmer, Werner Herzog, told a Press meet here soon after the film premiered in Competition that his work had nothing to do with the earlier one. “I have not even seen it”, he quipped. "There is no relationship, because I never saw it. But I am convincingly told that they have nothing to do with each other.” In a more jocular vein he added that "I hope Abel Ferrara will see my movie, which he has not seen. And I hope I will see his film soon. I am sure we will meet soon with a bottle of whiskey between us. "

This may not be farfetched with Ferrara soon showing his latest “Napoli, Napoli, Napoli” out of competition here.

Herzog’s work follows a drug and sex addicted homicide detective (played by Nicolas Cage) and his prostitute girlfriend (Eva Mendes) as they struggle through the troubles they create for themselves post Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. A brutal murder of illegal immigrants drives Cage’s Bad Lieutenant into a situation of fight to finish, and he breezes through his mission, cocaine addiction, excruciating back pain and other problems notwithstanding.

While Mendes, who was also present at the Press conference along with Cage, felt that “The Bad Lieutenant” was a “warped fairy tale, but a fairy tale all right”, Cage had more critical things to say. He said “one clear underlying difference between his Bad Lieutenant and Keitel's is the latter's search for redemption. The movie Abel made is excellent, but it is very much a Judeo-Christian programme where the character is loaded with Catholic guilt and redemption. The Bad Lieutenant Terrence I play has no guilt. It is not about that. “I did not choose to approach the film with the idea I was portraying evil in anyway. You can ask me if he is a good cop, a bad cop, I won't answer. He just is."

Explaining his part in the film, Cage said playing a drug addict was a completely different experience for him than what it was when he essayed an alcoholic in ‘Leaving Las Vegas.’ For this movie I would have a couple of drinks for the prescribed scene, see how it would feel and put it in the film. But I could not do that with drugs”.

“The Bad Lieutenant”, despite its drugs and guns, is a love story that many would miss out. There is something very poignant about the relationship that the cop and the call girl share. But punctuating this romance is utterly dark humour. There is one scene where Terrance tells a drug dealer to shoot the man again, for “his soul is still dancing”. Ugh.

Gautaman Bhaskaran is a veteran film critic and writer who has covered Cannes and other major international festivals, like Venice, Berlin, Montreal, Melbourne, and Fukuoka over the past two decades. He has been to Cannes alone for 15 years. He has worked in two of India’s leading English newspapers, The Hindu and The Statesman, and is now completing an authorized biography of India’s auteur-director, Adoor Gopalakrishnan. Penguin International will publish the book, whose research was funded by Ford Foundation.