Movies - Brazil

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Brazil (first released on February 20, 1985) is a dystopic black comedy feature film directed by Monty Python member Terry Gilliam. It was written by Terry Gilliam, Charles McKeown, and Tom Stoppard. It stars Jonathan Pryce, and features Robert De Niro, Kim Greist, Michael Palin, Katherine Helmond, Bob Hoskins, and Ian Holm. Co-writer McKeown also has a small role.

Synopsis

Set "somewhere in the 20th century", the retro-futuristic world of Brazil is a gritty urban hellhole patched over with cosmetic surgery and "designer ducts for your discriminating taste".

The world of Brazil appears to be almost post-apocalyptic in nature. This is not due so much to the given enemies of the state (terrorists) but to a bureaucratic implosion. Brazil has become so hopelessly overcomplicated that entropy has taken over and the world appears to be on the perpetual verge of complete mechanical failure from all fronts. Layered over this is the increasingly insane amount of paperwork required to get anything done.

The story begins with Sam Lowry (Pryce), a low-level bureaucrat technician whose primary interests in life are his vivid dream fantasies to the tune of a 1930s Brazillian song "Aquarela do Brasil", inadvertently getting involved with terrorist intrigue when his dream woman (Greist) turns up as the neighbor of a man ("Buttle") arrested as a terrorist instead of another man ("Tuttle") on account of a typographical error (and literal computer bug). Other people in Sam's life include the real Harry Tuttle (De Niro), the "terrorist" who is actually a renegade heating technician and the intended target of Buttle's arrest order; Jack (Palin), a family man and childhood friend of Sam's whose actual occupation is a government torturer; and Sam's mother (Helmond). It also features his nervous boss, played by Holm, and a friend of his mother who undergoes a series of increasingly disturbing cosmetic surgeries.

A mysterious wave of terrorist bombings is met by an increasingly powerful Ministry of Information (MOI), whose jackbooted thugs never admit to arresting and torturing the wrong man. Sam's simultaneous pursuit of the truth and the woman he fantasizes about draws him into the higher echelons of the Ministry, despite Jack's repeated efforts to warn him that his quest will inevitably bring Sam into more danger than he can cope with.

Analysis

Gilliam refers to this film as the second of a trilogy of movies, starting with Time Bandits
(1981) and ending with The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
(1989). He notes that the three films share a related theme of the struggle for imagination and free thinking in a world constantly suppressing such ideas. The story incorporates references to the final episode of The Prisoner, a UK TV series from 1967.

The plot has some awkward points, the most notable being the instant hate-to-love transition made by the female lead for the hero Sam. Gilliam later confessed to being disappointed with this element of the film, and by Kim Greist's performance.

Cinematically, the film has been viewed as a dark parody of science fiction adventure films (the film has been specifically referred to as lampooning Star Wars, but the same sentiment could also apply to similar themed works that came after, such as The Matrix
). Such films often feature a reluctant, ordinary citizen being transformed into a hero against a faceless, omnipresent dictatorship. Brazil lampoons many features of the genre.

Some of the film's core ideas are open to interpretation. Where exactly does Sam slip from reality into fantasy? Do terrorists actually exist, or is it simply the MOI staging bombings to give reason for its existence? Analysts from the political left raise the question whether parallels are meant to be made between the world of Brazil and either the societies of the United Kingdom under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1979–1990) or the United States under President Ronald Reagan (1981–1989), both contemporary to the film's production. Conversely, analysts from the political right draw parallels between Brazil's government bureaucracy with communism, social-democracy and socialism, in analogy to Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four
(the movie was indeed originally scheduled to be released in 1984). The movie can thus be interpreted from a civil libertarian perspective from either the political left or right. It is never made clear what country or year the movie is set in (although the vehicles have the driver's seat on the left). Given Gilliam's own experiences in the film industry, Brazil could also conceivably be interpreted as a critique of institutional Hollywood. In a more general interpretation, one could view the film as a warning against allowing faceless technology to control all aspects of people's lives. In this sense it could be argued that Brazil is a natural extension of the treatise against the British Industrial Revolution that forms the core of the novel Frankenstein.

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Movies - Brazil

Synopsis

Analysis

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