Terry Gilliam – Brazil (1985)

Quote:
Through its wildly comic, furiously creative, and intensely moving façade, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil ponders a future made to sustain a draconian past molded by inequality. In this dystopia, the rich, having long knelt at the alter of radical capitalistic tyranny, spend their days having their flesh stretched, sliced, and injected with ultraviolet potions, while the working class types, files, signs, and stamps its way through pointless paperwork. Overrun by communicative ducts, coated wires, cement and metals, and magnified, miniature computer screens, the future conjured up by Gilliam averts the familiar prophecy of an anaesthetized, plastic world overrun by rampantly advancing technology. Indeed, men, who see advancing technology as an affront to their fiscal station and take the pecuniary gain of the morbid, perverse 1% as their modus operandi, unmistakably run the future of Gilliam’s film. New technology is expensive; paper is cheap.

Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) is in the thick of it, one of the litter of suited drones who’s also tasked with performing the day-to-day needs of his sniveling, inept boss (Ian Holm). The son of a grotesquely materialistic mother (Katherine Helmond), Sam is given to flights of fantasy wherein he’s a winged knight, soaring through the sky and saving an angelic beauty (Kim Greist) from a dour, cold industrial zone, to distract himself from the unwarranted nepotism his mommy dearest insists on enacting. Gilliam, working from a script he co-wrote with Tom Stoppard and Charles McKeown, presents Sam as tellingly unambitious and apolitical but lovesick, feverishly seeing the beauty from his fantasies in the open spaces of the cityscape’s massive, oppressive stone buildings.

In reality, the beauty is Jill, a truck-driving courier who, in a chilling, darkly comic early sequence, witnesses her neighbor being violently taken away by the Ministry of Information (M.O.I.), where Sam is up for a promotion to the highly secretive Information Retrieval sector. The film brilliantly uses the ineptitude of the M.O.I. in all their dealings (notable exceptions: torture and killing) as the inciting incidents that lead not only to Sam’s eventual rebellion against the system, but also the continued bombings perpetrated by Archibald Tuttle, perfectly played by Robert De Niro. It is, in fact, a clerical error, via a bored drone’s obsessive need to kill a pesky fly, which sends the M.O.I.‘s militaristic security force after Jill’s neighbor, Mr. Buttle, instead of Tuttle.

Tar-black in its comic tone, Brazil nevertheless rouses a wide range of robust emotions through its stunningly coherent, madly inventive narrative. Sam and Jill’s romance is hard-won, delicate, and strangely sweet, their culminating roll in the hay radiating pure joy, but the filmmakers also tap potently into the ruthless irresponsibility that a privatized bureaucracy engenders. After Mr. Buttle is carelessly executed by M.O.I., Sam pays a visit to his widow (Sheila Reid) to pass on a check, only to be met with a potent vision of violent grief and loss that wouldn’t be completely out of place in a depiction of the Irish troubles. If Gilliam ultimately prefers the grotesque in his imagery, his predilections never limit the tremendous emotional experience that he imparts in Brazil.

Along with Sam, Jill, and Tuttle, Buttle’s widow cuts to the humanistic heart of Gilliam’s masterpiece (“We’re all in it together” is a repeated phrase), but there’s no mistaking the imprint of a Monty Python member. Physical and visual gags run through the film like those infernal ducts, and Gilliam makes great use of a brilliant supporting cast, from Bob Hoskins’s aggressive Central Services worker to Jim Broadbent’s pompously kiss-ass plastic surgeon to Michael Palin’s mild-mannered torturer-drone. The endless visual power of the film in all its Reed-Langian glory is matched by Gilliam’s unerring love for performers of untamed physical and verbal talents.

As Sam and Jill’s rebellion is cut short, it’s Palin’s torturer who brings upon Sam’s amazingly sad conclusion, and it’s here where Gilliam’s fanatical movie love comes to bare, as Sam is left to live inside a cinematic fantasia inside his mind as his body is left motionless. Besides the obvious Orwellian elements, the filmic pedigree of Brazil is richly layered, potently evoking The Third Man, the Marx brothers, Battleship Potemkin, Star Wars, Kurosawa, Casablanca, 8 ½, Modern Times, and, most vibrantly, Metropolis, among others. Such tremendous artists and films depicted both the harshness and necessity of reality, as well as the enveloping power and ultimate intangibility of imagination and expression, and Brazil is a glorious ode to that essential dichotomy. Ironically anticipating his own rebellious fight against Universal, the heads of which wanted to relegate the film to a simple, 94-minute fantasy, Gilliam presents an utterly singular vision of a world where the cold, exacting actions of an all-powerful plutocracy are at once fighting against and employing fantasy, where the individual can be eaten alive and erased by pieces of paper.

	
Terry Gilliam - (1985) Brazil.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2h 23mn
Size: 	2.78 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x576 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	2 541 Kbps
BPP: 	0.180
Audio
#1:  	English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 Kbps
#2:  	English 1.0ch AAC @ 44.3 Kbps (Commentary by Terry Gilliam)

https://nitro.download/view/CE764BF4C1DE72E/Terry_Gilliam_-_(1985)_Brazil.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English