A mute rape victim (Zoë Tamerlis Lund) seeks revenge DEATH WISH-style in Abel Ferrara’s MS. 45
LATE-NIGHT FAVORITES: MS. 45 (Abel Ferrara, 1981)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Friday, April 11, and Saturday, April 12, 12:10 am
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.drafthousefilms.com
If you missed the new digital restoration of Ms. 45 at BAMcinématek’s “Vengeance Is Hers” festival in February, you have another chance to catch it this weekend when it screens as part of the IFC Center’s weekly “Waverly Midnights: Late-Night Favorites” series on April 11-12. Abel Ferrara’s third film, following the 1976 pornographic 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy Cat and the 1979 gorefest The Driller Killer, is a low-budget grindhouse female revenge fantasy set on the gritty streets of New York City. In Ms. 45 (also known as Angel of Vengeance), Zoë Tamerlis Lund makes her screen debut as Thana, a mute woman working as a seamstress in the Garment District. After being raped twice in one day on separate occasions, she soon goes all Death Wish / Taxi Driver on men seeking a little more from women. Thana — named after Freud’s death instinct, Thanatos, the opposite of the sex instinct, Eros — grabs herself a .45 and quickly proves she is one helluva shot as she goes out in search of potential victims in Chinatown, Central Park, and the very place where Woody Allen and Diane Keaton sat on a bench, romantically looking out at the Queensboro Bridge in an iconic moment from Manhattan. Ferrara, who plays the masked rapist, captures the nightmarish feel of the city at the time, where danger could be lurking around any corner, with the help of James Lemmo’s lurid, pornlike cinematography and Joe Delia’s jazz-disco soundtrack. Lund would go on to cowrite Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, in which she plays a junkie named Zoë, before drugs killed her in 1999 at the age of thirty-seven. Ms. 45 is a cult classic that keeps getting better with age — and yes, that is a man dressed as Mr. Met at the Halloween party.