Brazil

Brazil; science-fiction / satire, UK, 1985; D: Terry Gilliam, S: Jonathan Pryce, Kim Greist, Ian Holm, Michael Palin, Robert De Niro, Bob Hoskins, Ian Richardson, Peter Vaughan, Jim Broadbent, Barbara Hicks

Christmas, some dictatorship country in the future: an explosion set by terrorists destroys a TV store. An official kills a fly that falls into the typewriter, causing an error that misspells Mr. Buttle as a terrorist, instead of Mr. Tuttle. The innocent Mr. Buttle gets arrested, tortured and killed, while his neighbor Jill wants to find the people responsible behind that mistake. Meanwhile, Sam Lowry is an employee in the information section who also spots the mistake, while the real Tuttle enters his apartment and repairs his ventilation. Sam falls in love with Jill and runs away with her in a truck, but they get caught by the government. Jill gets killed while Sam gets summoned to a torture chamber. In his dreams, he imagines he is still with Jill before he loses his mind.

Terry Gilliam's best film besides "Monty Python and the Holy Grail", "Brazil" is an extremely stylish ode to Orwell's classic book "Nineteen Eighty-Four" (even its working title was "1984 1/2"), actually a better "adaptation" than the Michael Radford's film with the same title released a year earlier, a bizarre Sci-Fi satire on totalitarianism that shows the director's frustration with the mad, bureaucratic system he is living in. Actually, even though not many managed to get it back in 1985, the film "matured" very well and is now a cult satire among the films that ridicule totalitarian societies, and almost all roles are placed very well, from the hero Jonathan Pryce, Bob Hoskins as the repair man and Robert De Niro as the repair man in rebellion. The characters are slightly marginalized, but some scenes are so brilliantly weird they create their own style: Sam drives a car, there is a POV shot of movement through some buildings, and then a man with a bottle appears above a tower, revealing it all to be just a model of buildings; Sam lifting a man from his wheelchair so that the latter can urinate; a TV guest commenting the 13-year success of terrorists with: "Beginner's luck!" A random poster for a yacht trip says: "Top Security Holiday Camps. Luxury without fear. Fun without suspicion. Relax in a panic-free atmosphere." A recurring dream sequence of a liberating angel with wings flying in the clouds who observes how buildings are rising up from the ground is there to show Sam's longing for escape from his mechanical, real world trapped in endless bureaucracy which is just there to keep people under control, and his yearning for some human contact. This is a fascinatingly different film with all of director's trademarks ('daft' set design, dark humor, grotesque-felliniesque characters, extravagant visual style, outsiders trying to find their place in the "broken world"), but it is so hermetic, cold and messy, with an interesting dark ending that it is not for everyone, even though everything is logical and radiates with hidden messages, so that everything fits in the end as a whole.

Grade:+++