Watching both versions of this 1964 drama of Elephant Man-style exploitation reveals an impressive degree of tenderness and complexity
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.