Brazil (1985)

("Somewhere in the 20th Century")
IMDb

Terry Gilliam had a hard time getting his depressing satire of modern life released by MCA Universal. When the studio brass finally saw the thing they hated it so much that they where just going to shelve it indefinitely. However the director took out a full page ad in a major trade publication criticizing the decision, and eventually the studio relented. Brazil went on to be one of the most talked about films of the year, and today makes a number of notable best picture lists, including Time Magazines.

The story seems to have been grown from George Orwell's 1984, keeping a roughly similar story structure but taking aim at the bug-a-boo's of then contemporary English life. Johnathan Pryce's Sam Lowry is our Winston Smith figure, stuck in a go nowhere bureaucratic job in a bureaucratic society, while Kim Greist plays Jill Layton, a women that our hero first sees in his dreams. When Sam comes to realize that his fantasy women is real, he risks everything to pursue her, all the while becoming involved in the aftermath of the abduction, interrogation, and death of an Innocent man, all due to a clerical error. In addition to the standard 'rag against the machine' aspect of this dysatopia, we get critiques of commercialism, organized religion, television, terrorism, youth obsession, and both the upper and lower classes. Perhaps the most disturbing story line to me was the ill advised plastic surgery of Mrs. Alma Terrain (Barbara Hicks), friend of Sam's mother Mrs. Ida Lowry (Katherine Heimond of Who's The Boss, her plastic surgery obsession is also disturbing). Despite repeated complications to her treatment the old women remains in denial, even as she physically deteriorates before our very eye's. All of this leads to the supremely disturbing funeral sequence, in which her already partially liquefied corpse is placed in a pink coffin with a ribbon tied around it, the supreme symbol of a society's inability to recognize the utter ugliness of death. I just can't get that image out of my head.

Anyway suffice it to say that this movie left me supremely down. It is extraordinarily well made, and my initial appraisal of it continues to increase the more I reflect upon the proceedings. It left me so disgusted at certain aspects of modern life, that it reminded me that my growing quasi-socialism is eventually going to have to do battle with my anti-bureaucratism, and the latter is probably more likely to win, at least so far as Brazil remains near the for front of my mind.


The title of the film by-the-way comes from a trip the director took to the South American nation some years before. He was struck by the image he saw one evening of Brazilians relaxing on the beach at dusk, listening to cheap little radios, while in the distance a smoke and fire spewing plant of some kind could be seen going about its business. This was the genesis of Brazil in Gilliam's mind, and why he continued to insist on that title despite protest from the studio that it was confusing. Grade A stuff.