Ms. 45 (1981)
Review of Ms. 45 (1981), directed by Abel Ferrara
I’d never heard of this movie before accidently stumbling upon it on Kanopy, and oh my god I don’t know how I hadn’t heard of it. Back in my college days I attended this really strange film junkies group where they watched a certain sub-sect of exploitation films that were extremely sexual, and to be quite frank, screwed up towards women.
A lot of them were filmed in the eighties, just like this movie was, and never gained any sort of critical acclaim. Ms. 45, however, is now a big hit among independent and underground movie fans.
There are some major trigger warnings attached to this movie—our main character is literally raped two times in a row. She is pulled into an alley while coming home from work in the Garment District of New York City, and then, as she enters her apartment to cope with what has happened and be in a safe space, a burglar literally breaks into her home and then rapes her right then and there.
This then triggers the rest of the events depicted in the movie, but if you’re not comfortable with these topics, I suggest clicking out of this review and going onto another one.
A mute woman, after walking home from work one day, finds the greatest source of vengeance after she is raped twice.
Our main character in this film is Thana, a mute seamstress for an apparel shop in the Garment District. She is played by the late Zoë Tamerlis, who is actually quite notorious for the circumstances behind her death.
Off-topic, yes, but she was an avid advocate for recreational cocaine and hard drug use, which is what led to her early death at the age of thirty-seven. In this performance, however, she quite brings to life a character who can’t speak, although, at times, I found her acting to be a bit wooden and repeating the same facial expressions again and again with little nuance.
The story in this film really gets going during the second rape, as horrible as it is to type that. Thana, who has been overcome with blind rage, ends up killing her rapist with an iron. Because she is in her apartment, she can’t just drag the body out somewhere and dispose of it. This is New York City, that’s nearly impossible.
So instead she puts him her bathtub, leaves him there for the duration of the movie. I wondered a lot about how the neighbors couldn’t smell the decomposing body, especially in an NYC apartment scenario, but didn’t question it much further. But other people begin to notice a stark shift in Thana’s demeanor.
When she goes to work after the incident, she is immediately triggered by her creepy male boss ripping a shirt off of a mannequin. A blatant symbol there, especially as mannequins often represent the female body.
Thana goes into shock and her coworkers get worried, but she eventually brushes them off and goes about her day. Her old landlady notices her behavior, too, and Thana goes home and chops the body of the burglar up.
The burglar had a gun, which marks another big shift in Thana’s behavior. She’s now triggered by anything distinctly feminine being intruded upon in any way, such as her own breasts as she sees them in the mirror.
She has become afraid of men and what they can do to her, leading to a series of tragic incidents where creepy men are now being shot by Thana. In her rage and fear, she has become the killer of all the quote-on-quote bad men in the city.
At the same time, her old landlord’s dog really wants to get into her refrigerator because he smells that chopped human meat up, leading Thana to tie the dog up in some park and literally leaving him there.
Thana then goes on a murder spree. Some of those men are justified as deserving it, but it gets really messed up when she makes a dumped salesman commit suicide. The ball in the park for me was when she dressed up as a nun and goes to her work party with the intent of murdering her boss, which then leads to her own death as she is exposed in front of her coworkers as a mass murderer.
My feminist brain immediately picked up on the significance of Thana speaking as she’s quite literally stabbed in the back by a female co-worker. The fact that it’s a female coworkers isn’t lost on me because that shows two sides of the same coin.
Thana probably thinks she’s doing the world a favor by getting rid of these seedy men. She’s doing it to protect other women, while the female coworker thinks Thana is just insane and stabs her to protect everyone else at the party.
They’re doing these extreme actions in the name of protecting others, but one merely has become so jaded and traumatized she’s prioritizing killing a specific gender versus getting vengeance against those who did this to her. When her last words, when she loses her muteness temporarily, are “sister,” that shows us the viewers the relationship between these forces.
The nun costume also has some symbolism here too. A nun is supposed to be chaste and a virgin, something that was quite literally stripped away from Thana. She is wearing bright red lipstick, a visual often associated with femininity, independence, and sexual liberation / promiscuous behavior. This contradicts the image of the nun she is wearing on her body and reveals to us a glimpse of how she is an object of desire even when she’s dressed up as someone who is supposed to be holy.
Overall Thoughts
It’s an interesting movie to break down from feminist angles. Is it a bit dark and a harder topic to watch? Yes, definitely. This is very much an exploitation film, it doesn’t sugarcoat the topics and visuals of them, and it aligns with other exploitation films that I’ve seen from the era.
This movie, however, is better than those films to me because of how it depicts feminine rage and how she chooses to cope with the trauma inflicted upon her. In other exploitation movies I’ve watched, the woman typically just accepts her situation and is fully sexualized to the max.
They tend not to have thoughts. They exist to fill the stereotypical role of women and to be sexualized, but Thana quite literally fights back against this. It’s a bit refreshing.
