It’s a bit hard to know where to begin in describing Brazil, the 1985 Terry Gilliam satire of a world in which bureaucracy has run amok. You could say it’s a feverish, surrealistic, colorful, funny, horrible version of 1984, by George Orwell, though there’s no Big Brother, just a smothering mediocrity and mindless technology that infests every aspect of life. In fact, the original title of Brazil was 1984-½.
Jonathan Pryce as Sam Lowry
Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) is a low-level government technocrat who dreams of a life where he can fly away and spend eternity with the woman of his dreams. One day he is assigned the task of trying to rectify an error caused by a fly getting jammed in a printer, resulting in the death during interrogation of Mr. Archibald Buttle instead of the suspected “terrorist,” Archibald “Harry” Tuttle. Sam comes in contact with the real Tuttle (Robert De Niro), a renegade air conditioning specialist. Tuttle helps Sam deal with two Central Services workers who later return to demolish Sam’s ducts and seize his apartment under the guise of fixing the air conditioning. And so on.
Robert De Niro as Archibald “Harry” Tuttle
What’s striking and dismaying about Brazil is how spot-on current it is. The terrorists, the swat teams, the obsession with youth, the technology that is both hi-tech and half-a#%@, continue to resonate.
Brazil is the second in Terry Gilliam’s “Trilogy of Imagination.” The first was Time Bandits (1981), and the third was The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988). All three films are about escapes from ordered society.
The theme song of Brazil is “Aquarela do Brasil” (Watercolor of Brazil), known in the English-speaking world simply as “Brazil.” What does it have to do with this movie? Nothing, actually, but just as a dream can make perfect sense when you are dreaming it, the song is part-and-parcel of the feverish hallucination that is Brazil.
Source:
http://www.stcharleslibrary.org/wordpress/movies/brazil/
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