A mute rape victim (Zoë Tamerlis Lund) seeks revenge DEATH WISH-style in Abel Ferrara’s MS. 45
MS. 45 (Abel Ferrara, 1981)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
February 7-9
Series runs through February 18
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.drafthousefilms.com
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. A cult classic that keeps getting better with age, Ms. 45 is screening in a new digital projection February 7-9 as part of the BAMcinématek series “Vengeance Is Hers,” twelve days of films featuring fabulous woman protagonists and antagonists, including Sissy Spacek in Carrie, Sandrine Bonnaire in Secret Defense, Olivia de Havilland in The Heiress, Lily Ho and Betty Pei Ti Ting in Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan, and Pam Grier in Coffy.