[imagesource:here]

Marco Ferreri’s 1964 movie La Donna Scimmia (The Ape Woman), a silent black and white movie with two alternative endings, has pretty much received the equivalent of a standing ovation.

The film, inspired by the true story of a 19th-century Mexican indigenous woman Julia Pastrana, with a condition that has her entire body covered in hair (hypertrichosis), received a full star rating from The Guardian.

Pastrana, like the “Elephant Man”, was exploited as a fairground freak.

The reviewer has lauded the film as a “freakshow satire with bizarre alternative-ending payoff” that reveals an “impressive degree of tenderness and complexity”.

Here’s a quick synopsis before we give you the trailer:

[Pastrana] is brought to life here by an extraordinary Annie Girardot – France’s highest-paid actress of the time – in a natural measured and elegant performance from which emanates the ambiguous emotion of being alluring yet devastatingly poignant as ‘the ape woman’.

An unscrupulous hustler (a magnificent Ugo Tognazzi), discovers the young woman in a convent and marries her in order to get her on the freak-show circuit and cash in on the distinctive appearance of her body and face covered in hairs.

Alright, the trailer:

The review spoils the two endings but all you really need to know is this:

Producer Carlo Ponti persuaded the director to create a “happy ending” version so the film could be entered for the Cannes film festival, and there is the original version Ferreri shot with its much darker ending.

But you have to watch both; this dual narrative gives the film a new tenderness and complexity.

…It isn’t a question of one ending being better or more authentic than the other: they have to be consumed in parallel.

One could easily see The Ape Woman as a satire on misogyny, racism, and exploitation but it also creates a bit of uncertainty about how bizarre and how satirical it is supposed to be:

Maybe the time has come to see this film, not as a black comic provocation, but something to put alongside Fellini’s La Strada, something intimate, a vision of uxorious poignancy with its alternate realities…

I had to check what “uxorious” means: having or showing a great or excessive fondness for one’s wife.

The Ape Woman sounds interesting enough for a few stars, sure.

It will be available on digital platforms and on Blu-Ray from October 11.

[source:theguardian]