There’s no question women have continually faced daily harassment from men: on the street, in the office, in other public buildings, even in their own homes. From sleazy comments to inappropriate touching to all-out assault, it’s a wonder they want to be with us at all. We haven’t exactly earned their trust.
Abel Ferrera’s Ms. 45 exploits all of this but in a rather shameless manner. For about half its running time, though, it’s surprisingly provocative if not entirely convincing. Then, it goes completely off the rails.
Early on, we meet a sympathetic woman named Thana (the late Zoe Lund). She is so shy she only communicates through body language and the occasional handwritten note. Working as a seamstress in Manhattan’s garment district, as the movie begins, she’s about to have the worst day.
First, while walking home after a shift, she gets quickly raped by a masked goon (Ferrera himself in a cameo). Then, in a daze, she enters her tiny apartment only to find a thief who assaults her again when he can’t find anything valuable to steal.
In the middle of the much longer assault, Thana reaches for an object and after the gunman drops his .45, she bashes him in the head with it. Then she grabs her iron and finishes the job.
What happens next is, shall we say, rather unexpected. Instead of finding a way to contact police (why doesn’t she ask her nosy landlord to help her?), she drags his lifeless carcass into her bathroom, pulls him into the tub and closes the door. The next day at work, as a co-worker puts a new garbage bag over the trash bin, she gets a demented idea.
After slicing him up, Thana stuffs his separated parts into separate trash bags and then, after removing all her food, places them all in her fridge and freezer. Every time she departs, she takes one out and rather casually places it in a bin on the street. A homeless man rummaging for food opens one up and finds a hand. On second thought, he’s not that hungry.
An obvious question: did the assaults themselves turn Thana insane? Or were these psychopathic tendencies always within her, laying dormant until the sudden emergence of trauma? Because this is a cheapo exploitation thriller, we’ll never know for sure. Ferrera isn’t interested in character studies or deep analysis. He just wants his anti-hero to kill scumbags.
And there are a lot of scumbags in Ms. 45.
There’s the permed, cocksure fashion photographer who follows her out of a restaurant hoping to lure her with the promises of pot and an impromptu shoot. There’s the wealthy, chauffeured Saudi Arabian who has his driver pick her up off the street and offers her money for sex. There’s the pimp hassling and beating one of his sex workers in plain view of Thana. There’s the would-be gang rapists surrounding her one night. And there’s her overly handsy boss Albert (Albert Sinkys), who I originally thought was gay, but based on how he acts around her is probably bisexual.
Clearly inspired by Death Wish but less challenging and consistently thrilling, Ms. 45 starts losing its way when Thana completely transforms herself from a mousy self-defender who wouldn’t hurt a fly unless it was absolutely vital into a glamourous spree killer eagerly searching for new targets whether they wronged her or not, all while looking like she’s auditioning for Robert Palmer’s Addicted To Love video. Unlike Paul Kersey who deliberately attracted street thugs to attempt to attack him before he popped them, Thana doesn’t require as much murderous motivation. If you’re a guy, any guy really, she wants you dead. A fascist is a fascist, no matter the gender.
There’s a scene where she quietly observes a couple making out in front of a Baskin Robbins in Chinatown. The girl wants to go back to work but the guy doesn’t want her to leave so they resume kissing. Eventually, they stop. At one point, as he tries to get things going again, she shoves him off and he departs. Thana follows him until he goes to the front of his building.
As he tries to use the key to get inside, she pulls out her second rapist’s .45, the same gun she’s been using to assassinate men throughout the entire film. He can’t quite get the gate open and it looks like he’s a goner. But thankfully, at the last second nothing happens after he finally enters the front entrance. Thana’s evident disappointment is strange. What did this guy do to her to warrant her wrath? Even his girlfriend wasn’t this mad.
There are a lot of street harassers in Ms. 45, one of whom makes the fateful decision to follow Thana on her way home. For some reason, she drops her bag and runs. He picks it up and chases. Just as he’s about to give it to her, she shoots him. It makes the cover of the New York Post. Now, did he deliberately set a trap for him? Her fearful reactions suggest otherwise. Either way, the incident changes her forever. Now every guy she sees, whether they interact with her or not, is a potential threat. (There’s an effective scare when touching her own breast triggers a hallucination of rapist number one.) “I just want them all to leave me alone,” she writes to a co-worker. This only applies to a few of her victims. Ironically, she’s more of a menace than they are.
One of the more disturbing sequences involves an oversharing douche she meets at a bar. He goes on and on and on about his failed marriage, how the sex was great at first, then tapered off. While at work, he grew suspicious when his wife wouldn’t answer his constant calls, some of which took place at three in the morning. One day, he decided to follow her and discovers she’s a secret lesbian. Infuriated, he strangled her cat. Lovely.
Right on cue, Thana pulls out her pistol. But something goes wrong. The fool grabs the weapon and decides to pay tribute to Christopher Walken in The Deer Hunter.
For the absurd finale, Thana is invited by Albert, her eye-raping boss, to a Halloween party. As the crowd dances to the entertaining live band (that for some reason features a guy pretending to play the saxophone on a trumpet), he brings her up the spiral staircase to have his way with her. What follows goes beyond reason. If changing your mind about a vasectomy is worthy of a death sentence, then your standards are too low.
Before it loses its way, Ms. 45 does a good job of demonstrating the burdens of being a woman, the dangers that lurk everywhere you turn even when you think you’re safe in the company of other women. But once Thana starts executing random guys whether she’s under threat or not makes her as loathsome as Kersey in all the Death Wish sequels. She doesn’t refuse to get into the rich Saudi Arabian’s car when she’s invited. And she certainly doesn’t turn down his 100 dollar offer. At no time does he molest her and hold her against her will. He still gets shot in the dick.
Are we supposed to root for her fascism, to embrace her extrajudicial killings? I mean, I’m ok with her blasting away at five guys that clearly want to gang rape her but what did the guy in the wig and wedding dress at the Halloween party do to deserve getting popped?
I will say this for Ms. 45. It has a mostly good musical score. Joe Delia smoothly alternates between memorably moody John Carpenteresque piano solos in the quieter scenes to early 80s new wave during the fashion pitches to a full-on disco jam accentuated with a sometimes screeching saxophone during the Halloween party.
Like the original Death Wish, Thana never does get her revenge on that first rapist (we never see him again) and she, too, has a nauseous feeling after killing a man, in her case for the second time. And just like Paul Kersey, she quickly loses her humanity as her compulsion for fascism overtakes everything else. But at least the once pacifist architect doesn’t profile innocent people.
In her final moment, she utters her only word. Did she really think she was acting on behalf of other women?
Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Tuesday, July 16, 2019
3:49 a.m.
THE WRITINGS OF DENNIS EARL 