Ms. 45 (1981) Review
7/10
A garment district seamstress who doesn’t 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’s 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 came away from Ms. 45 rattled and impressed, in that order. It’s a cheap, nasty, smart film, and I respect how hard it works against its own genre’s appetites.
It also opens with twenty minutes that contain two assaults, both difficult, and no amount of formal interest makes that easy to sit through or right for most viewers. I’d warn anyone before I recommended it.
The Silence Is the Technique
Thana doesn’t 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 can’t report anything, can’t explain herself, can’t be talked out of anything, and can’t deliver the speech that this genre normally gives a protagonist.
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. That 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.
Lund is what holds the film together for me. She has almost nothing to work with except her face, and I couldn’t stop watching it. I find her more unsettling in stillness than most actors are with a page of dialogue.
Remove your protagonist’s ability to justify themselves and the reader has to do it. A character who explains their revenge has handed the moral work to the text. Silence is the strongest version and any constraint works. A narrator who won’t discuss a motive, a letter that was never sent, a conversation the character keeps avoiding. Don’t explain the constraint. The film never says why she can’t speak. That keeps it a fact about her instead of a condition with a cause.
The reader fills an absence with something specific to them. That’s more powerful than anything you could write into the space and it’s also less controllable.
The Escalation Is the Point
The first killing is self-defense. The second is a man who follows her. By the fifth she’s shooting men who have done nothing except approach her, and the film tracks the drift step by step. That structure 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 hasn’t 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’s 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’s killed is that he’s paperwork.
The photographer sequence is where the film got me. I wanted him shot, caught myself wanting it, and then understood that was the whole trap. I think it’s the smartest stretch in the picture. By the Halloween party the logic has gone entirely. She’s 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’s 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 look. 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’s doing more than the budget suggests. A repeating synthesizer figure, mostly. That establishes an interior state in a film whose protagonist can’t 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’s decided something. That gives the audience a reading of a face that supplies nothing.
Ferrara also appears in it, as the first attacker. That’s a decision worth knowing about and difficult to interpret generously. He was twenty-nine, directing, and cast himself in that part. I find that casting choice ugly. A director playing the first attacker in his own film asks for a charitable reading I can’t quite give him, and it’s the one decision in Ms. 45 that makes me want to hold the film at arm’s length.
Poverty in production produces a realism that money buys badly. Available light and real rooms read as truth and a lit set reads as a set. The corresponding literary version is writing about what you’ve seen instead of what you’ve researched.
A repeating musical figure can carry an interior life a silent character can’t articulate. In prose the equivalent is a recurring image the character notices and never comments on.
Long takes are a budget decision that becomes a style. Most distinctive technique started as a constraint somebody decided to own.
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’s a 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 won’t 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’s been about one woman, and the closing image suggests the film was never only about her.
That last shot is the reason I’d rate it this high. Four seconds at the very end, and the whole film turns outward. It also recasts the 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 establishing that for ninety minutes.
What the Cycle Was
The rape-revenge film was a considerable 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 works the other way. It films the assaults without any eroticizing and keeps them short, 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. That’s 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’s the whole distinction and it’s 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.
Emphasis and duration are your moral position. A work containing a terrible event is doing something different depending on how long it looks and what it looks at. There’s no neutral filming and no neutral prose. Every choice about where attention goes is a statement.
If you write an atrocity, the question isn’t whether to include it but how much of the reader’s time it occupies. A page and a paragraph are different works. A disreputable form can be used seriously and the burden of proof is entirely on you. Most work in a cheap category is cheap, and readers are right to assume it until shown otherwise.
Should you watch Ms. 45?
With major reservations, and it isn’t for most people. I give it a 7 because Ferrara made a rape-revenge picture that turns the audience’s appetite back on itself. Thana can’t explain herself, so I had to, and the film tracks her drift from self-defense to shooting a room without flinching. Sixty thousand dollars of real New York and Joe Delia’s score do the rest. What keeps it from going higher are those opening twenty minutes and a director who cast himself as the first attacker.
