Ms. 45 (1981) Review

A garment district seamstress who does not speak is attacked twice in one afternoon, the second time in her own apartment. She kills the second man with an iron, keeps the gun, and begins walking the city at night.

The 7 is for a film that is doing something with a disreputable form instead of simply operating in it. The rape-revenge cycle of this period produced a great deal of material that exists to stage assaults, and this one is constructed to make the audience uncomfortable about wanting the revenge.

I want to be plain about what this is. The opening twenty minutes contain two assaults, both difficult, and no amount of formal interest makes that easy to sit through or appropriate for most viewers.

The Silence Is the Technique

Thana does not speak at any point in the film. The condition is established immediately, is never explained, and is never treated by the picture as a disability requiring sympathy.

The film also gives her a working life in which the silence is unremarkable. Her colleagues communicate with her by gesture and by note, nobody in the garment shop treats it as notable, and the condition is a fact about the workplace instead of about her.

What it produces is an absence the audience fills. She cannot report anything, cannot explain herself, cannot be talked out of anything, and cannot deliver the speech that a protagonist in this genre is normally given.

That absence is the film’s entire argument. A revenge narrative works by supplying justification, usually verbally, and removing speech removes the justification and leaves the audience to supply it themselves.

Compare what almost every other film in this category does. The protagonist states what was done to her, names it, and delivers a position before acting, which transfers the moral weight from the viewer to the text.

Lund was seventeen when this was shot and the performance is almost entirely eyes and physical stillness. She had no acting background, went on to write Bad Lieutenant, and died at thirty-seven.

The Escalation Is the Point

The first killing is self-defense. The second is a man who follows her. By the fifth she is shooting men who have done nothing except approach her, and the film tracks the drift precisely.

That structure is what separates it from most of the cycle. The genre’s standard shape is a list of deserving targets, and this one starts with a deserving target and proceeds to men who are rude, then men who are present.

The pimp, the photographer and the sheikh are the middle section and each is progressively less justified. The film is clear that the audience’s appetite has not diminished at the same rate.

The photographer sequence is the sharpest of the three. A man who offers her work, is professionally pleasant, is exploiting her in a way that is entirely legal, and the film is asking whether the audience wants him shot as well.

He also offers her money, which the film is careful about. The transaction he proposes is entirely legal, is framed as an opportunity, and the only thing separating him from everybody else she has killed is that he has paperwork.

By the Halloween party the logic has gone entirely. She is shooting a room, the men in it are guilty of being men in a room, and the film has arrived at the place it was heading from the first reel.

The dog is the detail that tells you the film knows. She is stopped by a woman with a small dog, the dog is the only thing that interrupts her, and the film uses an animal to establish that nothing human has been reaching her for some time.

Sixty Thousand Dollars

The film was made for almost nothing with a crew of very few people, shot on the street without permits, and the poverty is visible and useful.

New York in 1981 required no set dressing. Garment district loading bays, empty avenues at night, a park nobody is in, and interiors that are actual apartments with actual furniture.

The subway is used twice and both times the geography is real. Turnstiles, a platform, a tiled corridor with a bend in it, and the film’s most effective staging is a pursuit through a space with an actual corner in it instead of a built one.

The garment district itself is the best of it. A workplace of sewing machines, fabric bolts and a manager who talks constantly, filmed in a real one, and the ordinary tedium of the job is established before anything happens.

The technical limitations produce the film’s texture. Available light, direct sound with all its problems, and long takes because coverage costs money, and the result looks like a document instead of a picture.

Joe Delia’s score is the other asset and it is doing more than the budget suggests. A repeating synthesizer figure, mostly, which establishes an interior state in a film whose protagonist cannot describe one.

The score also stops. There are long stretches with nothing on the track except street noise, and the pattern is that the music arrives when she has decided something, which gives the audience a reading of a face that supplies nothing.

Ferrara also appears in it, as the first attacker, which is a decision worth knowing about and difficult to interpret generously. He was twenty-nine, directing, and cast himself in that part.

The Nun’s Habit

The final sequence has Thana at an office Halloween party dressed as a nun, with the gun, and the image has become the film’s signature.

It is a genuinely good idea and the film earns it. She works for a man who has been harassing her for the entire running time, the party is the office’s one social event, and the costume is what was available.

What the image does is state the film’s position without dialogue. A woman dressed as something that signifies chastity, purity and submission, killing men at a party, and the picture never comments on any of it.

The last shot is the film’s best decision and I will not describe it, except that it involves a woman who has been present in the background throughout and it arrives in the final four seconds.

What that shot does is move the film’s subject one step outward at the last possible moment. Everything before it has been about one woman, and the closing image suggests the film was never only about her.

It also recasts the whole picture as being about a workplace instead of about a street. Everything that happens to Thana happens to women she works beside, and the film has been quietly establishing that for ninety minutes.

What the Cycle Was

The rape-revenge film was a substantial commercial category in the late seventies and early eighties and most of it is indefensible.

The economics explain it. An assault sequence and a revenge sequence is a structure that can be shot for very little, was reliably distributable to grindhouse and drive-in markets, and required no stars. A great many of these films exist to stage the first half and use the second as permission.

This one is constructed the other way. The assaults are filmed without any eroticizing and are over quickly, and the revenge is where the film spends its attention and where it becomes uncomfortable.

The second assault is the clearest evidence of that. It happens largely offscreen, in a doorway, and the film cuts to what she does about it, which is the reverse of where the category normally places its camera.

The disposal sequences are the other evidence. She dismembers the second attacker and distributes him across the city over several days, and the film films all of it as domestic work, in her kitchen, with a slight air of tedium.

That is the whole distinction and it is a matter of where the camera spends time. Two films can contain the same events and be doing opposite things, and the difference is entirely in emphasis and duration.

Should you watch Ms. 45?

With substantial reservations, and it is not for most people. A mute protagonist with no way to explain herself, which leaves the audience to do it, an escalation the film tracks honestly from self-defense to indiscriminate, and sixty thousand dollars of New York that needed no set dressing.

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