Marco Ferreri’s 1964 movie La Donna Scimmia (The Ape Woman) is a bizarre satire whose effect depends on keeping you unsure how bizarre and how satirical it is supposed to be. This is due to the vivid streak of sentimental tragicomedy that runs through the film – in fact, through both versions of the film that were made, and that now have now been included on the Blu-ray and digital versions of this release. 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.
The Ape Woman is inspired by the true story of Julia Pastrana, a 19th-century Mexican indigenous woman with hypertrichosis, a condition that meant hair covered her entire body. Like the “Elephant Man”, she was exploited as a fairground freak. Ferreri’s drama, set in the present day of 1964, gives us a roguish, seedy entrepreneur called Antonio, played by Ugo Tognazzi, who has brought his slide projector to a nunnery in Naples to put on a supposedly improving and educational show about missionaries in Africa. In the convent’s kitchens, he discovers a cringing young novitiate, Maria (Annie Girardot), who is ashamed of being freakishly covered in hair. Antonio chivvies and charms the poor girl and persuades the sisters to let him take her home, finally agreeing to marry her so he can put on a rackety backstreet show in a converted warehouse in which she must caper around, in and out of a cage, pretending to be an ape, while Antonio cracks a whip and tells the gawping crowds he found her in Africa.
Soon Maria becomes more confident in her performance and local impresario Majeroni (Achille Majeroni) brings their preposterous act to Paris, repurposed as an exotic striptease routine. Maria becomes pregnant; in one reality she and her hirsute baby die wretchedly in childbirth, but in the other version she survives, with a normal baby. However, the experience causes her own excess hair to fall out and she becomes just like any wife and mother, while Antonio humbly submits to taking a normal job at the docks. It isn’t a question of one ending being better or more authentic than the other: they have to be consumed in parallel.
Twenty-first century audiences will, understandably, see The Ape Woman as a satire on misogyny, racism and exploitation. Also it is comparable, in its surreal challenge to good taste, to Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks, or Nagisa Oshima’s Max Mon Amour from 1986, with a woman taking a chimp as her lover. It is also reminiscent of the MC’s creepy song in Cabaret with his ape-faced lover: “If you could see her through my eyes … she wouldn’t look Jewish at all.” But it is also clearly intended in other, less readable ways: as a broadly heartwarming, if strange cautionary tale of hubris, redemption and love.
There are some amazing moments in The Ape Woman: particularly Antonio and Maria’s wedding, when he takes her outside to parade through the streets while she sings the bridal song through a microphone. And their striptease has something very desolate, with its grisly new sexiness betokening what we now have no choice but to see as a loss of innocence.
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: Antonio rescuing his wife’s mummified dead body from the museum so he can continue doing a grisly sideshow with it, and Antonio meeting his wife and child for lunch while he toils at the docks. Ferrera (and Ponti) somehow created something daringly postmodern.