Brooklyn, 1 9 5 2. Harry is a Union representative during a workers strike against a factory. When two trucks still enter the factory, an angry mob surrounds the premises and the trucks are barely able to escape. Harry is married and has a baby, but is secretly gay and has an affair with transvestite Regina, but the latter only exploits him for his money. When Harry is out of money, Regina dumps him. Harry wants to have sex with a guy, but is attacked and killed by an angry mob... Joe is shocked to find out his daughter Donna is pregnant, so he finds her lover Tommy and forces him to hastly marry her... Prostitute Tralala and her three pimps bring soldiers from the Korean War to a dock to rob them. When she has sex with a soldier who leaves for war, she falls in love. In a bar, Tralala feels lonely so she exposes her breasts and calls for every man to have sex with her. A friend chases the men away and gives Tralala her sweater, and cries as she comforts him.
After numerous directors failed to adapt the difficult novel "Last Exit to Brooklyn" by Hubert Shelby Jr. to the big screens, the director Uli Wedel succeeded with this film adaptation that feels somehow chaotic in trying to unite four stories into one whole, yet a one that dazzles with aethetic cinematography by Stefan Czapsky and a clear sense for reconstructing the mentality and set design of Brooklyn in the 50s. The movie is depressive and bleak, but it features the excellent Jennifer Jason Leigh as prostitute Tralala whose cleavage is somehow there to bring some uplifting energy and light into the picture. The movie juggles with such themes as homophobia, unemployment, poverty, repressed emotions and intolerance, but its most fascinating observations revolve around the exploitation of people in love seen through two perspectives: Harry and Tralala.
Through Harry, who is in love with gay man Regina, but who doesn't want to go out with him once he is out of money, the movie shows the emotional toll of victims of such love-money exploitation. Conversely, by showing it from the perspective of the exploitator, Tralala, who only uses soldiers for money or for robbery by her three pimps, the story explores a peculiar anomaly in this rule when she herself falls in love with a soldier. After the soldier is sent to war, the movie's most unusual and perplexing sequence shows up, the one where Tralala finds herself feeling something she never felt before—lonely. At a bar, all the men are preoccupied with other women, while she just sits there abandoned. The confusing state of being in love and missing that person, causes Tralala to do a strange step—she exposes her buxom in front of everyone and says: "Best tits in the western world!" This is one of those sequences that are legendary and famous even if people never heard of them, containing a sort of "subconscious fame". The dialogues are rather conventional, and some moments feel too melodramatic, yet "Last Exit to Brooklyn" is still a well made depiction of existential dread searching for some light at the end of the tunnel.
Grade:++
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