Last Exit To Brooklyn, set in the year 1952, showcases a phase in life for many people who are already set in a cycle where escape seems to never be an option. The director, Uli Edit, adopts a grim and desaturated color palette so that everything looks monotonous and lifeless like night. Which makes the movie come across as very haunting. And although the characters look the most obliging at night, it does not mean they are actually being honest.
Unlike many others, Last Exit To Brooklyn does not seem a pessimistic approach in a naturalistic way. The gradual destruction of these characters seems much too over the top designed so that we sympathize with them as much as possible. A dark comedic approach seems to be preferred as most characters strike as a few notches away from a full-blown caricature. It does remind me of my favorite show Twin Peaks, the show where human suffering is portrayed in a funny way rather than seriously. Unlike Twin Peaks, Last Exit To Brooklyn does not drift to downright absurdity. Mark Knopfler’s score perfectly encapsulates this through the use of grand score beats that will remind the audience of Twin Peaks and the archetype composer Angelo Badalamenti.
Last Exit To Brooklyn is an example of an ensemble film with so much happening that everyone gets relevant screen time to tell their part of the story.
The characters are intertwined with each other because of their location in the city and because everyone is struggling to get by. Brooklyn itself is quite tense. When the film begins, workers from what appears to be the largest local factory in the area have begun their strike for the fifth month. One of the key figures in the union campaigns is the shop steward, Harry (Stephen Lang), who has recently been promoted to strike secretary.
In some ways, it offers him a sense of fulfillment, but, unfortunately, it does little to alleviate the horrorfest that is his home life. Harry is married to a woman and has no children. The absence of kids and the surrounding sheer horrifying desolation is, in one scene that depicts Harry’s wife, self-evident. He is in fact a gay man, and desperately hiding it. A little way into Last Exit To Brooklyn, a film in which he undergoes a relationship with an effeminate man, he will start to tell some people. This man, redolent of undiluted masculinity, does not care for the unrelenting sense of hopelessness that is steadily mounting within poor Harry, a man that chances to be classically hunky.
Things don’t end well for Harry, and it also doesn’t bode well for the rest of the cast in Last Exit to Brooklyn. This includes every character from Tralala (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the bottle-blonde sex worker who thinks she found true love with a deep-voiced, boy-faced sailor. It even includes Georgette (Alexis Arquette), a transgender woman, who is treated rather awfully by those around her but manages to embody the love she has for a guy named Vinnie (Peter Dobson).
One of the strikers Big Joe (Burt Young) stands out since he seems to be the only one willing to put in the effort. Big Joe appearing like he has the potential to be the most engaging character. He is not shackled to the life of misery like most here, having an actual shot at claiming a happier working life. Whether he chooses to accept the notion that his teenage daughter (Ricki Lake) is pregnant is totally up to him, along with the fact that her baby daddy will significantly be a presence in his life. For most of the movie, Pugnacious Joe’s inability to control his temper will make this rather difficult. But at some point, he will learn to control it. So will the strikers.
In the end, Last Exit to Brooklyn’s tragedy is a reminder that not everyone turns up their lives for the better, and with this pummeling the few who do get the winds is disheartening.
EDEL’S BREAKTHROUGH MOVIE, Christiane F. (1981), shares the same trait with Last Exit to Brooklyn; it is drenched in sordidness. However, it is conducted in a more straightforward manner, and at some point, in genre one or other ‘pleasure’ in this case a David Bowie concert takes places which could never exist in the ‘Last Exit to Brooklyn’ living nightmare world. Although some of the movie gets a little sensationalist, especially in the last act, the nail biting part of it the movie is otherwise a for the most part a soothing empathic drama of a 13-year-old girl Christiane (Natja Brunckhorst) who, owing to her utter boredom at home and desire to grow up, immerses herself in the young nightlife scene of West Berlin, gets totally addicted to heroin.
Wringing to die somewhere in such agonizing squalor a threat of moralizing, cautionary condescension Edel’s direction makes it difficult to spot. With a huge help from Buckhurst, who is phenomenal, he let’s the story be told from the inner self of the character rather than nutting the character into forced imagery, so simple and unprotected and so sophisticated at the same time, Christiane so easily finds herself straddling so close to death.
Her age and lack of experience do not come into question; think back to when you were 13, this movie captures that feeling of wanting to be more and knowing more simultaneously.
It elaborates on a book published in 1978 where the Christiane in real life explained her troubles. Part of this adaptation is softened from how things really went; it allows its anti-heroine the easy ways out and more boring than actively harmful homelike her nonfictional counterpart never got to experience. But Christiane F. does balances things out because it is a remarkable low key movie about drug addiction.
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