Whether they are accepting or denying, giving in or holding back, every teen struggles with their sexuality in the same beautiful way: begrudgingly perverted.
This plaintive shamefulness is the style that Eugene Jerome deals with his outright horniness, far more than I originally remembered, in this adaptation of Neil Simon’s Broadway play of the same name. Starring the usually irritating Jonathan Silverman as said Eugene, we follow the fourth-wall-breaking nebbish teen over a couple of weeks as he devises different ways to leer progressively at old-time broads and get himself off subsequently.
Eugene is supposedly 15 or so, but looks to be about a solid 25. Still, his life primarily consists of running to the store for his mom for sugar or playing stickball in the street while, in the background, his pre-WWII family is facing real problems: His brother tells off his racist boss, his father has a heart attack and a boatload of European relatives escaping Hitler is coming to stay.
These are things that would affect many people, but not Eugene — instead, he’s either looking up his dancer cousin’s skirt or fantasizing about his aunt in the shower, which is refreshingly disgusting and, saddest of all, woefully honest. Maybe one day I’ll write my own youthful remembrance entitled Blooming Grove Boners because, believe me, there were many.
In retrospect, Brighton Beach Memoirs should probably be remembered as one the dirtiest teen movies of the 1980s, a horndog flick with nostalgia for the old folks, family values for the parents and undergarments galore for the inquisitive kids who’ll wonder for years what the “Golden Palace of the Himalayas” is — a viewing party without any true shame because it’s got the guy who wrote The Odd Couple’s name attached to it.
It was followed up a few years later with Biloxi Blues starring the equally grating Matthew Broderick, but I never saw it. I heard it’s got a prostitute, though. —Louis Fowler