Ms. 45 – Angel of Vengance

Abel Ferrara, USA 1981, 84 mins

From the man who brought you the highly watchable Bad Lieutenant, the highly unwatchable King of New York, and perhaps one of the scariest vampire films of all time (I just hope it was meant to be a comedy - having seen last year's Treasurer Mark Brown virtually in tears because he was laughing so hard, one can only presume so) The Addiction.

Ms. 45 departs from Ferrara's usual formula of having lots of psychotic Americans going round raping, shooting, killing and dismembering each other (okay I lied - okay!). We see Thana (Zoe Tamerlis) a shy young mute textile worker in New York being raped on her way home. When she finally gets home she encounters a burglar in her house who rapes her again, as we look on voyeuristically.

Killing him in self defence, she carves up the body and gradually disposes of it around town. By this point she has a big time chip on her shoulder (as opposed to the dead burglar/rapist whose shoulder is chipped and probably sprinkled on the municipal gardens at this stage... but I digress) and starts a one woman crusade to rid the city of all the lecherous males around by shooting them.

However as the spree continues and Thana comes more and more out of her shell, she begins more and more to enjoy the killing and becomes less and less discriminating about which males she kills as the film progresses.

Finally after sexual harassment at work and a genuinely bad day a (maybe some of those stress balls would have been better) she heads off to the work fancy dress night out in her habit for an all out shooting spree, where if it moves ­ male or female ­ she shoots it.

Very much a case of "Nuns with Guns" with a blood bath at the end that would have made Peckinpah's Wild Bunch seem like a trip to the local play group (not however armed with machetes or Uzi's unless you live in the US of course).

Thankfully Ferrara keeps this one tight and short (unlike The Addiction) and it keeps the attention the whole way through. Gory but a gotta see.

Stephen J. Brennan
EUFS Programme 1998-99

Thana (Zoë Tamerlis) is a young mute woman. Withdrawn and isolated she lives alone and works in a sweatshop in New York's garment district. On her way home a masked man drags Thana into an alleyway and brutally rapes her. (Director Abel Ferrara played the rapist, using his 'Jimmy Laine' pseudonym on the credits.) Thana manages to make it to her apartment, where she disturbs a burglar. The burglar attacks her. In the struggle Thana manages to grab an iron and bludgeons him to death. Understandably traumatised, Thana does not report the incidents to the police or do anything of that sort. Taking matters into her own hands, she takes the burglar's .45 automatic and dismembers his body. Storing the pieces in her fridge for the time being, Thana takes a couple of bags of bits out each day and dumps them where they won't be identified. Armed with the .45 Thana goes out as the 'Angel of Vengeance' and kills a succession of male chauvinist types. None of her victims understands what she's doing until it's too late, taking her muteness for acquiescence and female passivity. With each killing Thana's confidence grows, to the point where she can make a dramatic entrance at her work Halloween party dressed in a combination of a nun's costume and suspenders - a male fantasy figure, for sure, but one with a deadly ability to confound any sexist's desires.

Ms .45 was the second film to come from the Abel Ferrara/Nicholas St. John team. Following on from The Driller Killer (1979) it recasts that film's theme of urban insanity with a female protagonist and a semi-feminist approach. Think Taxi Driver (1976) meets Repulsion (1965) and you'll not be far off the mark.

The Taxi Driver reference film highlights a problem that has dogged Ferrara's career since. While he can claim to be an auteur with a distinctive world-view - quasi-religious tales of suffering and redemption in the hell of New York City - this world-view also overlaps to a considerable extent with that of Martin Scorsese, who marked out this territory first with Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver and Raging Bull (1980). Thus critics who are favourable to Scorsese, as the reigning King of New York cinema, often tend to knock Ferrara. They see his treatment of the same themes, in the likes of Bad Lieutenant (1993), as derivative and lacking in any genuine spiritual commitment. (Woody Allen, that other New York director, is jester in this court!)

Ms .45 is perhaps the most perfectly realised and original of Ferrara's descents into the urban hell of contemporary New York. Its strong female character and feminist sexual politics rescue it from the Scorsese imitation orbit. Scorsese has never had much of a way with female characters, excepting the aberrant Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974). Ms .45's thick streak of black humour - mostly centring around a nosy neighbour and her yappy dog who make body disposal difficult for Thana - make it easier to take than Bad Lieutenant. (Interestingly Zoë Tamerlis contributed to the script on Bad Lieutenant and appears, under her married name Zoë Lund, as the rape victim nun who offers Harvey Keitel's corrupt cop the chance of redemption.) And while The Addiction (1995) reworks the alleyway rapist of Ms .45 as a (female) vampire and the mute garment worker as a philosophy postgraduate, it suffers from a po-faced seriousness about a situation that we are fundamentally less able to take seriously. Any humour in The Addiction is entirely unintentional; much of the philosophical dialogue has to be heard to be believed.

While both Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant and Lili Taylor in The Addiction give impressive, powerful, performances, neither can quite match up to Zoë Tamerlis's Thana.

In last year's programme I praised Catherine Deneuve for her performance in Repulsion, where she too is rendered (near) mute and must rely on other means of expressing her character. Tamerlis outdoes even Deneuve's performance, brilliantly conveying the vulnerability and then the growing (psychotic?) confidence of Thana as she finds a means of expression.

Programme note by Keith H. Brown
October 1998