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.
“Tanny’s body created inspiration for choreographers,” one of the interviewees says in Nancy Buirski’s documentary Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq. “They could do things that they hadn’t seen before.” The American Masters presentation examines the life and career of prima ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, affectionately known as Tanny, who took the dance world by storm in the 1940s and ’50s before tragically being struck down by polio in 1956 at the age of twenty-seven. Le Clercq served as muse to both Jerome Robbins, who made Afternoon of a Faun for her, and George Balanchine, who created such seminal works as Western Symphony, La Valse, and Symphony in C for Le Clercq — and married Tanny in 1952. In the documentary, Buirski (
After his dog runs away, a homeless tramp jumps into the Seine, only to be rescued by a bookseller who brings him home to stay with his family in Jean Renoir’s 1932 masterpiece, Boudu Saved from Drowning. Adapted by Renoir from René Fauchois’s play — the brief opening scene takes place onstage, announcing that what is to follow is essentially a fable — the depression-era social satire centers on the relationship between the wacky, unpredictable bum, Priapus Boudu (Michel Simon, who also played the lead in the play), and Edouard Lestingois (Charles Granval), a bourgeois bookstore owner cheating on his wife, Emma (Marcelle Hainia), with one of their maids, Anne-Marie (Sévérine Lerczinska). Lestingois first spots Boudu while looking through his telescope at the masses on the Pont des Arts, like a filmmaker shooting a documentary; “I’ve never seen such a perfect tramp!” he declares. (Indeed, Renoir regularly comments on the art of filmmaking in Boudu, especially with his use of music, nearly all of which is eventually revealed to be coming from natural sources.) Lestingois helps save the suicidal Boudu, nursing him quickly back to health and letting him stay at the house, much to the chagrin of his wife. Rather than being thankful, Boudu is a whirling dervish of ill manners, breaking dishes, using fancy lingerie to shine his shoes, and daring to eat sardines with his hands. Despite Boudu’s rudeness, Edouard, Emma, and Ann-Marie are all drawn to him in different ways, particularly Edouard, who dresses Boudu in his clothes as if he were a kind of doppelgänger, an alternate version with a completely different set of expectations and responsibilities. But there’s no controlling the bushy-haired Boudu, who reacts to all stimuli like a child who does whatever he wants, not caring about the consequences. One of the keys to the film is that very barrier, the question as to whether Boudu is a conniving tramp who knows exactly what he’s doing or just a pitiable poor soul with no self-control. Boudu — and, therefore, Simon, who gives a towering, spectacular performance, one of the greatest of early cinema — is part Charlie Chaplin, part Buster Keaton, part Little Rascal, and the influence of the character extends to Denis Lavant’s underground creature in Léos Carax’s Merde short in the Tokyo! omnibus and Eddie Murphy’s Billy Ray Valentine in John Landis’s Trading Places. (The film has also been remade twice; Paul Mazursky’s Down and Out in Beverly Hills stars Nick Nolte as the tramp, while Gérard Depardieu plays the role in Gérard Jugnot’s 2005 Boudu.) 
For twenty years, Baltimore has been defined by such television series as Homicide: Life on the Street, The Corner, and The Wire, shows filled with rampant violence and drugs. This past November, the U.S. Census Bureau released data showing that the poverty rate from 2010 to 2012 in the city of Baltimore was more than twenty-five percent. During that same period, debut filmmaker Lofty Nathan embedded himself with a group of teens and young twentysomethings who ride two- and four-wheel dirt bikes through the streets and parks of Charm City, popping vertical wheelies that point up at the sky. Nathan documents their activities in 12 O’Clock Boys, offering an inside look at this dangerous phenomenon (which has spread to other inner cities as well). “This is our tradition, our culture, this is what we do. Can’t nobody take it from us. This is our release,” one rider says as he puts on a mask. “Baltimore City Sunday: F@ck city council, f@ck the police. I pity them that try to stop us. This is our sh*t.” Indeed, the police are rarely far away, either in marked cars or helicopters, but they are limited in how they can chase the riders because of public safety concerns. Nathan focuses in on twelve-year-old Pug, a tough-talking, smart street kid who starts skipping school, instead dedicating his every waking moment to trying to become a Twelve O’Clock Boy. Meanwhile, there’s little his mother, Coco, a former exotic dancer raising five children on her own, seems to be able to do to stop him. It’s sad to see Pug make this choice, turning his back on education while declaring the police to be the enemy, but Nathan makes no moral judgments about him or any of the other boys and men who take part in this illegal activity, which seems to exist primarily to fight authority. He also doesn’t delve into the political, socioeconomic, and racial factors that have impacted the rise of such a scenario. Instead, he lets Pug, Superman, Shawn Sean, Wheelie Wayne, and Albert Lemon — a former copy now running a regional security outfit — speak for themselves. And it’s a scary story, one that, regardless of which side you’re on, can only have a tragic outcome if something isn’t done about it.