Ms. 45 (1981)
Directed by: Abel Ferrara.
Written by: Nicholas St. John.
Starring: Zoë Lund (Thana), Albert
Sinkys (Albert), Darlene Stuto (Laurie), Helen McGara (Carol), Nike
Zachmanoglou (Pamela), Abel Ferrara (First Rapist), Peter Yellen (The Burglar),
Editta Sherman (Mrs. Nasone), Vincent Gruppi (Heckler on Corner), S. Edward
Singer (The Photographer), James Albanese (Nick).
Abel
Ferrara’s Ms. 45 (1981) has been described as a feminist exploitation film, and
while that would seem to be an oxymoron, it’s actually a very apt description
of the film. It has all the elements of what was already a well-established
sub-genre in 1981 – the rape/revenge film, where at first the female lead is
raped and abused by one or more men, and then he slowly enacts her vengeance on
it. This is probably exemplified by films like I Spit on Your Grave (1980) –
and others of its kind. Those films seem to want to have their cake in eat and
too – they linger over the rapes, taking in every inch of skin imaginable, even
eroticizing them – and then it goes onto punish the perpetrators, just so that
you in the audience knows the filmmakers are on the “right side” of things. The
films, at worst, encourage the rapes, and then encourage the violence right
after. You can defend those films if you want – some consider I Spit on Your
Grave to be a genre masterwork – but the Rape/Revenge genre has always been a
troublesome one for me – unless the filmmaker shows that they have some
differing take on it – like say Gaspar Noe with Irreversible (2002), which
takes place going backwards in time, so that the revenge comes before the rape,
and everything in the film is seen as clearly being horrific.
Abel
Ferrara’s Ms. 45 is perhaps a little bit more problematic than that film –
which has issues of its own – but I do think it’s also clearly wrestling with
those issues, not merely exploiting them. The film stars the multi-talented Zoe
Lund as Thana – a beautiful young, mute woman who works for a piggish fashion
designer. One day on the way home from work, she is attacked in an alley and
raped. She stumbles home in shock, only to arrive there, and find a burglar has
broken into her apartment, who then proceeds to rape her as well. She is able
to get the upper hand on him – bashing his skull in with an apple statue (a
too-on-the-nose symbol). She then proceeds to chop the man up, and start
leaving his body parts around New York in bags. The burglar had a .45 on him –
which she takes, and starts to exact revenge on the men around her. It starts
with a man whose actions are admittedly creepy, and possibly threatening –
spreads to a violent pimp, and some (mixed race) street gang members – but will
eventually include nearly every man she comes in contact with – some who are
clearly sexist pigs, although perhaps nothing more than that (to be clear,
being a sexist pig is bad – but it doesn’t deserve a death sentence) – and some
who we have no information about at all to decide whether or not they even
“kind of” deserve what they get.
Ferrara
is an interesting director – and one who has always seemed to float between
B-movie exploitation, and the art house circuit, never quite fitting in
anywhere. If you look at the plot summary of many of his movies – including Ms.
45, but also his best film, Bad Lieutenant (1992), in which Harvey Keitel plays
a perverted cop investigating the rape of a nun (which was, by the way,
co-written by Lund, the star of Ms. 45), they sound very much like sexy
exploitation films. Yet few films are less erotic than Bad Lieutenant – or the
most recent of his films that I have seen – last year’s Welcome to New York,
where Gerard Depardieu plays a hulking, sweating French diplomat in New York,
who starts out having an orgy, before he progresses to raping a hotel maid. In
Ms. 45, Ferrara doesn’t linger over the rape scenes either – in I Spit on Your
Grave for instance, the first hour of the film is pretty much one rape scene
after another, until she starts getting her revenge in the last 30 minutes. In
Ms. 45, the rape part is over fairly quickly – maybe 10 minutes in total (and
most of that isn’t the actual rapes) – and by having two, completely
unconnected rapes happen to the same woman in such rapid succession, Ferrara
is, I think, pointing out the absurdity of this plot convention in the first
place.
Lund
is great as Thana – the rape victim turned avenging angel – she makes the most
of all of close-ups Ferrara gives her, which is really our only insight into
her thought process, as she never says a word throughout the film (well, until
the last moment). Lund’s face moves from mute terror, to icy cold fury
throughout the film – and seemingly every time she heads out into the streets
to kill, she gets more and more dressed up – attracting worse and worse
characters. In the show-stopping finale – a massacre at a costume party – she dresses
up as a nun, and takes aim indiscriminately at any man in her sites.
What
are we to make of Ms. 45? Thana really isn’t a vigilante killer, since she ends
up targeting men as a gender, not just criminals. This isn’t really a female
led version of Death Wish for instance. Why does Ferrara cast himself as the
first person who rapes Thana? Should we continue to feel sympathy for Thana –
in the opening, surely, but what about when she goes on her rampages? Are men,
and a society that is run by them, responsible for her actions – or is it all
on her? Does the film exploit Lund’s undeniable sexuality – she was 19 when the
movie was filmed, and drop dead gorgeous, the camera never tires of looking at
her – or does it use it to make a larger point about how women are perceived?
How
about all of the above? As with nearly all of Ferrara’s films, the film isn’t as
clear cut as it appears on the surface – the sexual politics on the surface of
the film are blunt, but are deeper than they normally would be in other films.
A sequence that has Thana follow home a young couple, when the man picks up his
girlfriend at his job and walks her home, clearly casts Thana as the villain.
This man seems perfectly nice – and even if he isn’t, we – and Thana – have no
way of knowing that. We’re actively rooting against
her at that point.
Ms.
45 doesn’t make anything easy for the audience. I understand why critics – and audiences
– pretty much dismissed the film back in 1981 – it looked like a lot of other films at the time, and
Ferrara wasn’t a known director yet – they didn’t really know what exactly to
expect from him. Ferrara is, if nothing else, always an interesting filmmaker.
He has directed some truly awful films in his career – and a few truly great
ones as well. He never makes it easy on the audiences – and his films are often
rife with contradictions. Sometimes, those contradictions sink the film. In the
case of Ms. 45, it is responsible for its lasting power.
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