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"Simul justus et peccator," Abel Ferrara's cinema. The cop at home in hell, St. Augustine in New York and no mistake, Harvey Keitel turning himself inside out in a scum-bucket tour de force. He drops the kids off at school and promptly snorts cocaine, a rosary dangling from the rear-view mirror in the foreground. He ogles a drive-by victim's bloody breasts, pockets money from convenience store robbers, slow dances with hookers while Johnny Ace pledges his love on the soundtrack. "No one can kill me. I'm blessed. I'm a fucking Catholic." He wakes up from a stupor to cartoon mice on the living-room TV and switches to the baseball game he's bet thousands on, by the end of the playoffs he's $120 grand in the hole. The case at hand is a nun (Frankie Thorn) raped by Spanish Harlem hoods (the Madonna topples, the Calvary rises), in church the camera tilts down from lyrical lighting to yellow police tape surrounding the desecrated altar. "Double or nothing," the Ferrara approach when blurring seamy and sublime. The world and the soul, the tragicomedy of extremes, a magnificently sustained excruciation. (After peeping at the violated religieuse, the nameless protagonist follows his own defiling urges with an unforgettable bit of obscene pantomime involving a couple of teenage New Jersey joyriders.) Interlude with Ms .45 herself, Zoë Lund as a stringy wraith with lingering syringe and undead monologue: "Vampires are lucky. They can feed on others. We got to eat away at ourselves." A Pasolini implacability throughout, Keitel's resemblance to Victor McLaglen adduces Ford's The Informer. "Talk to Jesus" is the sister's advice, the silent apparition absorbs the sinner's howling litany before dissipating into a confused parishioner. Mystery of charity, "a holy thing," the loan shark's bullet completes the tableau of transfiguration in front of Trump Plaza. Herzog's secular recomposition filters the slapstick through a reptilian eye. Cinematography by Ken Kelsch. With Victor Argo, Paul Calderón, Leonard Thomas, Robin Burrows, Victoria Bastel, and Paul Hipp.
--- Fernando F. Croce |