Why I love Zoë Lund’s performance in Ms 45 | Little White Lies

In Praise Of

Why I love Zoë Lund’s per­for­mance in Ms 45

21 Feb 2023

Words by Sarah Cleary

Close-up of a woman with red lipstick, serious expression, and dark eyes.
Close-up of a woman with red lipstick, serious expression, and dark eyes.
Her per­for­mance as the mute gar­ment work­er Thama who takes on the scum­bags of New York City is the heart of Abel Fer­rara’s rape-revenge thriller.

Every day, on every street, in every city,” grim­ly intones the nar­ra­tor, women are insult­ed, abused, threat­ened.” The voice is Abel Ferrara’s, and this is the trail­er for his sopho­more fea­ture, Ms 45. We see a strik­ing young woman mak­ing her way down a bustling New York City street, while a suc­ces­sion of cat-callers leer and jeer at her. Her beau­ty is oth­er­world­ly and her expres­sion is hard to place – some­where between high anx­i­ety and vacancy.

This is Zoë Lund as Thana, the tit­u­lar Ms. What’s her secret?”, Fer­rara con­tin­ues, audi­bly smirk­ing. The trail­er then goes on to out­line, in a teas­ing­ly ellip­ti­cal fash­ion, the film’s rape-revenge struc­ture, giv­ing a prospec­tive grind­house audi­ence the rough idea. But it’s clear this is no ordi­nary exploita­tion quick­ie: the image of Lund dressed in a nun’s habit, lips paint­ed blood red and wield­ing a pis­tol in slow-motion is more eerie than it is strict­ly sleazy. What is she hid­ing?”, asks Fer­rara. Where is she going?”

Zoë Lund led a trag­i­cal­ly short life and a con­se­quent­ly short career, both of which have become chiefly asso­ci­at­ed with Fer­rara, though they only col­lab­o­rat­ed twice (she co-wrote and co-starred in his sem­i­nal Bad Lieu­tenant). A mul­ti­fac­eted and mer­cu­r­ial fig­ure, Lund was an accom­plished musi­cian, a mod­el, a nov­el­ist and a staunch advo­cate for the decrim­i­nal­i­sa­tion of Class A drugs. She didn’t just love hero­in,” punk rock­er and NYC scen­ester Richard Hell said of Zoë, she believed in it.” Lund was only 17 when Ms 45 began shoot­ing (she turned 18 dur­ing the four weeks of prin­ci­pal pho­tog­ra­phy), but she was giv­en an enor­mous amount of free­dom to shape her char­ac­ter and the film as a whole. Every scene was more or a less a para­graph on a page” Lund her­self would lat­er recall, and a lot of dis­cus­sion went on.”

The film fol­lows Thana, a mute gar­ment work­er scrap­ing by in the big bad city. She’s alien­at­ed from her co-work­ers, patro­n­ised and pawed at by her lech of a boss, and sub­ject­ed to a dai­ly bar­rage of unwant­ed male atten­tion on the mean streets of Man­hat­tan. She appears to be total­ly help­less, as well as lit­er­al­ly and fig­u­ra­tive­ly voice­less. One day, return­ing home from a dispir­it­ing day at work, Thana is raped twice – once in an alley­way by a mug­ger (Fer­rara in a director’s cameo), and then again by a bur­glar in her apartment.

While Fer­rara approach­es these scenes with an exploita­tion filmmaker’s can­dour, he does so with no dis­cernible eye towards tit­il­la­tion. This is sup­port­ed by Lund’s per­for­mance, which heart­break­ing­ly under­lines the psy­chic dam­age of both events, and stress­es dis­so­ci­a­tion over phys­i­cal agony (atyp­i­cal for the sub­genre). Her approach is nuanced and con­sid­ered, and Ferrara’s tech­nique is blunt – a potent and dis­qui­et­ing mix.

Dur­ing the sec­ond assault, Thana man­ages to bash the attack­er over the head with a paper­weight, then an iron, killing him. Over the next few days, she carves up the corpse, refrig­er­ates the parts, and dis­pos­es of them piece-by-piece around the city. She keeps his gun. Her mania and para­noia begin to build – she’s tor­tured by visons of her landlady’s watch­ful eye and her bath­tub drain bub­bling with human innards. She is unable to look at her bare breasts in the mir­ror with­out see­ing them groped by the hands of her rapist.

In one bril­liant­ly con­ceived scene, Thana is com­fort­ed by her co-work­ers as she suf­fers some­thing like a pan­ic attack. As con­cerned faces loom over her, she silent­ly grasps for words that sim­ply are not there. Here Lund’s per­for­mance stark­ly evokes the alien­ation and ter­ror of feel­ing one­self to be beyond help, and the inef­fa­ble fear that sup­port might some­how come laced with mali­cious intent.

A woman wearing a black costume and holding a gun, pointing it at the camera.

While out dis­pos­ing of a bagged-up body part, Thana is hound­ed by a cat­call­ing creep who inex­plic­a­bly insists on return­ing said brown paper bag to her. He chas­es her down a dead-end alley­way, she turns to see him charg­ing towards her and – with­out think­ing – she blows him away with her new­ly acquired .45 cal­i­bre pis­tol. But this first mur­der offers no cathar­sis for Thana (and there­fore rel­a­tive­ly lit­tle for us). She returns to her apart­ment pan­icked and sick­ened. It’s not until her sec­ond mur­der that Thana dis­cov­ers the restora­tive pow­er of deal­ing death.

Her first pre-med­i­tat­ed tar­get is a sleazy pho­tog­ra­ph­er who both­ers her and her co-work­ers at lunch. Unlike Lau­rie (a par­tic­u­lar­ly mouthy col­league), Thana isn’t able to tell the guy to get bent” as he con­tin­ues to pester her down the street. How­ev­er, she is about to deliv­er a more per­ma­nent form of rebut­tal. She shoots him dead in his own stu­dio. She doesn’t even get out of the elevator.

Final­ly, Thana’s trans­for­ma­tion into Ms 45 begins in earnest – a dis­crete new iden­ti­ty, that of an aveng­ing angel, that she builds for her­self. She dis­cards her mousy attire and begins wear­ing heavy make­up. She spends her nights dis­pas­sion­ate­ly off­ing men in the street: pimps, mug­gers, busi­ness­men. Lund said that it was Thana’s mute­ness that allowed her to exer­cise a greater degree of con­trol over the char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion, and it’s at this point that she deft­ly mod­u­lates that silence from vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty to strength. We spend the film teth­ered to Thana, but once her reign of ter­ror is in full-swing she starts to become obscure to us. Her paint­ed face becomes a mask. She’s mak­ing her­self into some­thing inhuman.

It might be gen­er­ous to describe Ms 45 as a fem­i­nist work, but it does upset the bal­ance of the pro­to­typ­i­cal rape-revenge film in thought­ful and point­ed ways. For instance, it explic­it­ly places sex­u­al assault on a con­tin­u­um with cat­call­ing and oth­er more inno­cent” forms of sex­u­al pes­ter­ing. In this way, the film does not posi­tion rape as an aber­ra­tion, but as some­thing endem­ic. More­over, the protagonist’s revenge is not reserved for the men who wronged her (nei­ther reap­pear). The vision that Thana brings to life through her vio­lence is one where­in no man, under any cir­cum­stances, can ever hurt her again. But this anti-hero­ine per­sona does ulti­mate­ly reveal itself as a deranged form of play.

Towards the end of the film, in a clear riff on Taxi Dri­ver, Thana the­atri­cal­ly pos­es with her gun in front of the mir­ror. She play­acts the mas­sacre she’s about to vis­it upon her workplace’s Hal­loween par­ty. She’s select­ed a nun cos­tume for the occa­sion, a potent sym­bol of female puri­ty – a woman with­out men. Lund’s per­for­mance in this moment is mes­meris­ing. She’s at once child­like and mon­strous, a self-made vision of twist­ed glamour.

The film up until this point has rest­ed com­fort­ably on her shoul­ders, but it’s dur­ing the cli­mat­ic par­ty sequence that her per­for­mance reach­es an ecsta­t­ic peak. As she cold­ly picks off the male par­ty­go­ers one-by-one, we see Thana total­ly sub­sumed by her fan­ta­sy. A less­er actor would let Thana become some­thing pure­ly sym­bol­ic at this point, but Lund’s per­for­mance keeps the ten­sion between real­i­ty and fan­ta­sy ever present in our minds. Thana her­self is not an abstrac­tion, but rather she is a char­ac­ter who has found some mea­sure of peace in embody­ing some­thing abstract: vengeance.

You might like