What does it take to get an Abel Ferrara film released today? Of the six features he made since ‘R Xmas in 2001, only 4:44 Last Day on Earth landed a distributor and a limited American release in theaters and on home video.
Ferrara fans – and yes, we’re still out here waiting for Mary and Go Go Tales to get a belated disc release if nothing else – will at least get some satisfaction from the revival and restoration of his grindhouse breakthrough Ms. 45, a femme-centered take on the vigilante revenge films of the seventies by way of Repulsion, written by his longtime collaborator Nicholas St. John and shot in the garment district of 1980 New York.
Zoë Lund (aka Zoë Tamerlis) stars as Thana, a mute young seamstress in a dumpy fashion house who is raped twice in a single afternoon.Lund looks like Nastassja Kinski’s American cousin, with round eyes and full lips and a fragile presence that evolves from a panicked helplessness to an aggressive boldness. “I just wish they would leave me alone,” she writes to a co-worker, yet it seems that every New York male over the age of consent is determined to put the moves on her with a native aggression that sends her spinning into horrific flashbacks.
Until she decides that the best self-defense is an armed offense. Her transition occurs in a few seconds as Thana’s squirrelly demeanor with yet another oily would-be pick-up artist steadies and strengthens and she gives him a hard look that Lund makes into a defining turn with the subtlest shift of expression and body language. The hard cut from Thana blasting away a sleazy photographer to slathering on bright red lipstick like war paint and trading her modest sweaters for sleek, sophisticated fashions is all the explanation we need. The passive victim becomes vengeful vigilante, hunting for potential predators using herself as bait. And she likes it. A lot.
Talk about empowering…
This is the good old bad old New York of Death Wish and Taxi Driver, when Times Square was a sleazy sideshow and crime was out of control. This is a city with a potential predator in every alley, gangbangers in the parks, pimps wailing on their women on the streets, and junkies and the homeless weaving through the sidewalks. Ferrera doesn’t indulge in the Stygian imagery of Scorsese’s nocturnal streets, but he does bring an elegance to his portrait of Manhattan by day and night and he doesn’t disappoint audiences looking for a vigilante bloodbath. Bodies fall, blood spurts, and flesh flies from exploding squibs of each gunshot wound. Her first kills are rushed and haphazard but as she takes the initiative in the hunt she also takes control of the scenes, coolly and efficiently (and in one case sadistically) taking out her targets with the confidence of an assassin.
Yet for a thriller motivated by the sexual assault of a beautiful young woman, he’s unexpectedly sensitive to her ordeal. This isn’t I Spit on Your Grave. He brings the camera close in on her face during the two rape scenes, forcing the audience to identify with the pain and violation of the victim rather than the power of the victimizer (played by Ferrara himself in the first assault).
Ferrara is still learning how to make a movie here. There are some wobbly performances and awkward moments and Thana’s instant evolution from timid young woman to coldly assured sophisticate and crack shot is something we just accept as part of the revenge movie convention. Sort of like a superhero origin story without the exposition. But there are also some nice character sketches between the bullets (a cuckolded husband in a bar, so upset that his wife cheated on him that he never even thinks of making a pass at Thana, becomes a touching little short story) and an undercurrent of black humor as she disposes of her first kill, carved into transportable pieces and dumped in trash cans and alleys around the city.
Ms. 45 is not a feminist revenge film. It is, however, an intelligent and confident piece of exploitation filmmaking marinated in helplessness and anger and heated up to furious vengeance turned psychotic retribution, and one that resists exploiting the woman at the center of it.
The film has been unavailable for theatrical screenings for years and out of print on DVD, where it exists only in a cut print. Drafthouse Films, the distribution arm of Alamo Drafthouse, has restored the film from the original negative and presents the complete, uncut version of the film in digital HD. Not that it looks stunning, mind you—this was a low budget film and the limitations are visible
Opens in New York, Austin, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Houston, San Francisco and Seattle on Friday, December 13, with other cities to follow through the month. A Blu-ray and DVD release will follow in 2014.