Product: Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans [Blu-ray] (2009)
Rating: 4.0
Days of the iguana
The last Herzog movie that I watched before this one was a documentary about a man who got killed by a grizzly. Before that there was a long break and I remember weird stuff with Klaus Kinski (Fitzcarraldo; Aguirre; Ouida), and wasn't there a Kaspar Hauser version?Anyway, the man is rather crazy, and this film with the crazy Mr.Cage stays true to form. Superficially a cop story set in post Katrina New Orleans, we might retell it as if it was a straightforward one: a police sergeant gets promoted to lieutenant for valiant actions during Katrina, which also caused him back problems and drug addictions. At the end he gets promoted some more. In the meantime he chases killers and drug dealers and at the same time he uses his cop power to steal drugs from his `customers' as well as from the police storage room. He is indebted to bookies and he shares his consumption habits with his girlfriend who spends her own working life in the meat trade. His father is an ex cop and AA activist, his stepmother an unabashed beer drinker. Such a happy family of addicts!Cage's character's luck seems to turn on him when he faces two short term payment demands, one of them from a gang of very violent men. He also seems to run into trouble, at last, with his employer, after running into the wrong targets for his own bullying on the job. It is not a good idea to antagonize people with connections.But don't expect Herzog to stay within the rules of realistic narration. There are scenes of outright weirdness, often involving animals. The camera once follows the world with the eyes of an alligator, or rather the camera is mounted on the gator's head. Or Cage, most of the time high, sees iguanas in his room, where nobody else sees anything. That is, we see them of course. Or a man needs to be shot twice, since his soul will not stop breakdancing after the first shooting.The plot line is also not exactly strictly logical. One has the impression that Herzog suddenly gets impatient with the direction of the plot and he screws up conventional logic to turn the story into some kind of surrealistic comedy.My personal opinion on him: he is just an eccentric with technical and artistic skills. Don't even try to see anything deeper in his products. They are exotic, and that is a value in itself.