Seldom Scene
Movie reviews by Gerald Panio

Search
Close this search box.

Brazil (1985)

Sam Lowry:  Excuse me, Dawson, can you put me through to Mr. Helpmann’s office?

Dawson:  I’m afraid I can’t sir.  You have to go through the proper channels.

Sam Lowry:  And you can’t tell me what the proper channels are, because that’s classified information?

Dawson:  I’m glad to see the Ministry’s continuing its tradition of recruiting the brightest and best, sir.

Sam Lowry:  Thank you, Dawson.

**********

“Hi there, I want to talk to you about ducts.”

 

So do I.  I’d like to dedicate this month’s column to Doreen Zaiss and the hard-working students in her Acting 11/12 class.  The dedication is appropriate as this month’s film is Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), one of the most nightmarish anti-utopias to come along since George Orwell’s 1984.  After watching the students’ superb job of dramatizing 1984 (one of my favorite Really Depressing Books of All Time), I was faced with the choice. Either look for an upbeat video to restore my faith in humanity, or indulge in an orgy of doom. Well……given the weather lately I chose the latter.

I think Terry Gilliam’s Brazil is a masterpiece.  It deserves the same kind of cult status, based on the genius of its visual design and its reification of the State gone mad, as that accorded to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926). The director’s cut of Brazil clocks in at 142 minutes, and every frame of those 142 minutes has more going on in it than lesser films have in their entire ninety or so minutes of mediocrity.  Ideally, Brazil should be watched on a 52-inch widescreen TV with a DVD player.   You want to be able to read every twisted little paranoid slogan written on posters in the background (“Don’t suspect a friend, Report him”), see every demented take-off on 1950’s Life magazine advertisements (“Top Security Holiday Camps: Luxury Without Fear”), and consider every architectural nuance of an alternate city whose  buildings seem an unholy hybrid of Art Deco stylings, soaring Gothicism,  and tenement slum squalor.  You enjoyed Alex Proyas’s recent Dark City?  Compared to the city that haunts Brazil, Proyas’s dark city was a Sunday in suburbia.  And we haven’t even talked about the ducts.

If you thought Big Brother was intrusive in 1984, he was a shrinking violet alongside the vast network of ducts which snakes through and violates every available public and private space of the city in which Brazil’s unfortunate citizens live.  What do these ducts do?  No idea.  But they’re a perfect metaphor for the kind of totalitarian state which controls every minutia of its citizens’ lives through a vast, ruthless bureaucracy built on fear and betrayal.  You’ll never look at a duct (or even a vacuum cleaner hose) in quite the same way again. For anyone who doubts that plumbing can be freighted with that much significance, I’ll remind you that Kafka’s most famous story has a man wake up as a cockroach. Monstrous humor, indeed.

In Gilliam’s film, the highest levels of the bureaucracy are represented by the Ministry of Information (i.e. lies and obfuscation), the bureau of Information Retrieval (i.e. torture and execution) and Central Services (duct repair). I earlier used the word “ruthless” to describe this bureaucracy. Notice that I didn’t say “ruthlessly efficient.”  In the true tradition of the Stalinist State, Brazil shows us a society which is expert at assassination, but where nothing actually ever works the way it should.  Elevators, for example, never stop level with their landings.  Restaurant food looks regurgitated.  The work crew trying to seal the hole in the ceiling of an apartment (through which one of about four SWAT teams has descended upon a terrified family on Christmas Eve) brings the wrong-sized plug because no one has told them the government’s gone back to metric. In the bowels of the cavernous Information Retrieval building, office workers in separate cubicles are forced to share the same desk through the wall, playing tug-of-war over who gets the bigger half.

The protagonist of the Brazil, Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce), is an anonymous functionary in the Ministry of Information (M.O.I.).  He’s actually a talented man who helps keep his bureau running despite the incompetence and spinelessness of his boss, Mr. Kurtzmann (Ian Holm). Sam hides his light under a bushel.  The less the state is aware of your existence, the better.  He uses his talents only to ensure that nothing goes wrong enough to catch the attention of his boss’s superiors.  The rest of the time, he and his fellow workers watch old movie classics on their TV monitors in the intervals between pretending to circulate vast quantities of paperwork from one stack to another.

Unfortunately, in Kafkaesque worlds paperwork is both meaningless and lethal.  You don’t even want to mention a Form 27b/6 unless you’re prepared to live with the consequences.  Sam Lowry’s personal nightmare begins as the result of a typing mistake caused by a squashed bug falling into a printer. The name “Tuttle” becomes “Buttle”, an innocent man is “deleted”, and Lowry ends up consorting with a rebel plumber (Robert DeNiro) and a possible terrorist (Kim Griest) who just happens to resemble the woman of his fantasies.  Poor Sam winds up challenging the very bureaucracy from which he’s spent his whole life hiding.  And yes, I did say rebel plumber.

There isn’t a happy ending.  I’ll tell you that right now.  The bad guys win.  Pretty much.  Unless you consider a torture-induced psychotic fantasy a kind of “escape.”  When the people at Universal Studios saw what Gilliam had wrought with their 15 million dollars they refused to release the film.  They demanded that he cut an hour off the running time and change the ending.  Gilliam fought back by inviting movie critics to secret screenings and by putting ads in trade papers demanding to know when his film was going to be released.    His guerrilla campaign eventually worked.  With some minor compromises, Universal finally released Brazil a full year after it had been completed.  It went on to be nominated for two Academy Awards, win kudos from critics, be immortalized in cult film houses, and spawn websites and doctoral dissertations filled with words like “Baudrillardian”, “diegetic”, and “illocutionary”.

The effectiveness of a film is often based on the subliminal effects created by the director’s or cinematographer’s choice of lighting and camera angles and movement. This is certainly true of Brazil.  One critic pointed out the psychological effect of Gilliam’s extensive use of low camera angles:  paranoia is heightened as constantly looking up at things makes them seem monolithic and threatening.  Pauline Kael, while expressing mixed feelings about the film, comments on its “weird vertical quality:  the camera always seems to be moving up and down, rarely across.  You get the feeling that people live and work squashed at the bottom of hollow towers.”  The visual look of Brazil is film noir (gray tones, elongated shadows, dimly lit corridors and alleyways) with splashes of surrealism (Sam’s Icarus/Galahad fantasy, a giant Samurai, sinister Oriental doll faces, the ducts).  For some reason, no matter what happens and how much time passes, it always seems to be Christmas. There’s also some of the creepiest use of sound effects engineering I’ve heard since I watched the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink. The ducts are alive with the sound of something.…gastric. H.P. Lovecraft and H.R. Geiger would feel right at home.

For anyone who believes that Gilliam’s perverse orchestration of totalitarianism is something limited to Monty Python alumni with large budgets, I’d like to close this review with a quote taken from a paper on Brazil written by Peter Avery.  Avery found an uncanny parallel to the dream sequence in Brazil where massive towers launch themselves out of the ground of the countryside like ICBMs to cut Sam Lowry off from his beloved angel:

“Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, organized the Nazi Zeppelin Field festivities….For the party rally at Nuremburg in 1935, he used 150 anti-aircraft searchlights with their beams pointing upwards, making a rectangle of light in the night sky…He wrote: ‘Within these luminous walls, the first of their kind, the rally took place with all its rituals. …I now feel strangely moved by the idea that the most successful architectural creation of my life was a chimera, an immaterial mirage.’  Doomed to disappear at first light, leaving no more material trace than a few films and the odd photograph, the ‘crystal castle’ was especially aimed at Nazi militants who, according to Goebbels, obey a law they are not even consciously aware of but which they could recite in their dreams.”

Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, too, is a chimera.  It too becomes part of our dreams.  But unlike the searchlights of Nuremberg, the fantastic visual effects of Brazil expose evil instead of disguising it.

Looking Back & Second Thoughts

“Confess quickly!  If you hold out too long you could jeopardize your credit card rating!”

 “Suspicion breeds Confidence”

 “Loose talk is Noose talk”

 “Be alert—some terrorists look normal”

 “Is there a suspect in your family?”

 “Regret nothing—Report everything”

 “Don’t suspect a friend—Report him”

 “Be safe—Be suspicious”

 “Consumers for Christ”

The mind is still boggled.  James Stewart ditches Frank Capra for Franz Kafka & Tom Stoppard.  I don’t think I’ll ever be able to watch Brazil without a sense of wonder and shuddering revulsion.  Largely, this comes from the sheer accumulation of disturbing detail offered up by the film.  There is always something there that you missed the first, or second, or third time around.  Gilliam himself said, “I work in this strange sort of magpie approach.  I just start collecting things, and having a central idea works like a magnet—things just start sticking to it.”  Gilliam’s description, and Brazil itself, reminds me of one of the few computer games that has ever caught my fancy—Namco’s Katamari Damacy for PlayStation 2, where an adhesive ball rolled around the countryside growing larger and larger as it picked up everything from thumbtacks to cows.  There was a liberating randomness to that ball of stuff that I also relish in the production design for Gilliam’s film.  Let’s face it, who else puts a leopard-print boot on top of a woman’s hat?  The French Surrealists who invented the game of cadavre exquis and praised the randomness of Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror would have recognized a kindred spirit in this description of Terry’s design sense: “Gilliam’s the sort of person that puts a toaster next to an answering machine and calls it a computer.  What Gilliam has always enjoyed is the frisson when you put things together.”  Some of the things put together in Brazil: an abandoned CWS flour mill, Leighton House, Mentmore Towers, a post-modern housing project in France’s Marne-la-Vallée, the Rainbow Room disco, Croydon Power Station, the BP refinery on the Isle of Grain, the Lake District, 1930s and 40s advertising, a Messerschmitt “Cabin-Roller,” Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, and George Orwell’s 1984.  It’s no surprise that Brazil has been cited as one of the precursors of the steampunk movement.

It also should come as no surprise that it took Gilliam a year to force a release of Brazil in a version that matched his original vision, rather than the studio’s bowdlerized 90-minute version with the tacked-on happy ending.  For all of its patent absurdities—from a desk shared on two sides of a wall, to the cyber-plumbing aesthetic, to Robert De Niro’s rogue duct man, to plastic surgery as self-flagellation—Brazil paints the grimmest of grim pictures.  Imagine Blade Runner without that last scene with Rutger Hauer on the rooftop finding one last way of embracing life and freedom of choice.  Gilliam’s movie has proven to be tragically prophetic.  Brazil looks the way the Donald Trump’s vision of America’s soul (or lack of it) currently feels: bureaucracy devoid of function, Golem-like militarized police, propaganda & lies over truth & humanity, and an unrelenting chorus of ugliness, hate, bigotry, aggression, and greed.  Beneath the slick technocratic surfaces of industry, corporatism, and media there’s an underlying ethical rot—perfectly symbolized by Brazil’s omnipresent, malfunctioning, visceral ductwork—that’s pitting haves against have-nots, ramping up paranoia, and eating away at the fabric of our planet.  And as societies around the world suffer from one shock after another–whether environmental, financial, biological, or societal—the powers-that-be are doubling down on what Naomi Klein described as the Shock Doctrine:  screw healing, exploit the chaos & pain to the maximum.  There’s a reason that dystopias constitute one of the fastest-growing genres in literature.  What began with Franz Kafka’s The Trial, George Orwell’s 1984,  Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, has exploded into Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments, Luanne Armstrong’s The Bone House, Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games series, Veronica Roth’s Divergent series, Neal Shusterman’s The UnWind dystology, and countless other contemporary novels for young adults.  Even George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones novels cut too close to the bone these days, using a mythical past to alert us to the dangers of a Machiavellian present and future.

Jeez, it’s no wonder I’ve been watching a lot of old musicals and Elvis Presley and Audrey Hepburn movies lately.  Even in these dystopian COVID-19 days, gotta dance, gotta sing.

Movie Information

Genre: Science Fiction | Drama
Director: Terry Gilliam
Actors: Jonathan Pryce, Kim Greist, Robert De Niro, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm, Bob Hoskins, Michael Palin, Ian Richardson
Year: 1985
Country:
Original Review: July 1999

Cyberspace:

Momijigari (Maple Viewing) running time: 2:25

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztEODdiT6hA

Jiraiya the Hero (Goketsu Jiraiya) running time: 20:48

https://archive.org/details/GoketsuJiraiyajiraiyaTheHero1921

Two silent films from Japan.  Here’s the description of the first, from Wikipedia:  Momijigari (紅葉狩?, a.k.a. “Viewing Scarlet Maple Leaves”, “Maple Leaf Viewing”, or “Maple Viewing”) is a Japanese film shot in 1899 by Shibata Tsunekichi. It is a record of the kabuki actors Onoe Kikugoro V and Ichikawa Danjūrō IX performing a scene from the kabuki play Momijigari. It is the oldest extant Japanese film and the first film to be designated an Important Cultural Property.

The second silent, from 1921, is by Shozo Makino, a pioneering early Japanese director.  From Imdb: “The story of Jiraiya, a legendary ninja with great powers who sets off on an adventure.”

Raja Harishchandra -1913- India’s First Silent Film (running time: 53:49)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6FuYf7r46Y

The first portion of the video consists of some documentary information on the director.  The actual film begins at the 12-minute mark.  From Wikipedia: “Raja Harishchandra (transl. King Harishchandra) is a 1913 Indian silent film directed and produced by Dadasaheb Phalke. It is often considered the first full-length Indian feature film. Raja Harishchandra features Dattatraya Damodar Dabke, Anna Salunke, Bhalchandra Phalke, and Gajanan Vasudev Sane and is based on the legend of Harishchandra, with Dabke portraying the title character. The film, being silent, had English, Marathi, and Hindi-language intertitles.”  The plot, from Imdb: “The homage to the upright King Harishchandra who almost sacrifices his kingdom for his love of truth, opens with a tableau showing the king, his wife Taramati and his young son, to whom he is teaching archery. They go on a hunt and the King blunders into an area controlled by the sage Vishwamitra and his disciple Nakshatra. To atone for his mistake, the king is banished. Three furies appear caught in flames whom Harishchandra tries to rescue. They seduce him into renouncing his kingdom. The king endures much hardship before a god appears at the horizon to reassure everyone that it was just a test of the king’s integrity. Written by Sujit R. Varma”

 Masterpieces

http://moviemartyr.com/masterpieces.htm

From the now-defunct moviemartyr.com website, a chronological listing by decade of noteworthy films.  I find lists such as this one useful when trying to decide on which classic film to check out next.  The selection here isn’t overwhelming, but it is international and if followed through would take you on quite a cinematic journey.  Some early choices were new to me, to my surprise.

Films Worth Talking About:

A Passage to India, The Official Story, Vagabonde, Hail Mary, Brazil, Witness, Lost in America, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Colonel Redl, When Father Was Away on Business, Subway, Ran, Cocoon, Pale Rider, St. Elmo’s Fire, Back to the Future, After Hours, My Beautiful Laundrette, My Life as a Dog, Ginger & Fred, Come and See, Desperately Seeking Susan, Dreamchild, Prizzi’s Honor, The Color Purple, Shoah, Sweet Dreams, Runaway Train

The Bigger Picture

Films12 Monkeys (1995), The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (2009)

Music

Books:  Jack Mathews, The Battle of Brazil; Lautréamont, Les Chants de Maldoror (translated by Guy Wernham)

The Word on the Street

[NOTE:  With 577 User Reviews and counting on Imdb as I write this, featuring a goodly number of loathers as well as fans, this is a conversation that’s not going to end anytime soon.  I’ve just quoted some of the fans.]

The whole design of Brazil’s crazy world is unlike anything I’ve ever seen in other movies (with the exception perhaps of those made by the same filmmaker). Where films with similar themes typically go for a futuristic look that is defined by all the technological advancements the writers and filmmakers can dream of, Terry Gilliam chooses the complete opposite direction. In his film, technology seems to have made no progress since somewhere around the forties or fifties, and what technology there is doesn’t exactly look very reliable. And unlike other dystopian films, it’s not primarily the bleak aspects of a totalitarian society Gilliam wants to explore; in his film, he wants to show how hilariously insane, inept and ridiculous many of the mechanisms and instruments of oppression truly are. In that sense, Brazil is mainly a satire (at least that’s how I perceive it), and it is often either darkly funny or downright hilarious.   [gogoschka-1]

I really can’t tell you how much my first viewing of this movie knocked me out. Nearly twenty years ago, before Terry Gilliam’s reputation is what it is today, seeing this in a cinema without knowing ANYTHING about it, it was one of the most unforgettable movie experiences of my life! Still is. I was a Python fan since childhood and well aware of Gilliam’s animation work, but nothing could prepare you for just how bizarre, funny, scary and disturbing ‘Brazil’ is. It’s still one of the most original and inventive science fiction movies ever made, with a surreal, retro future quite unlike anything seen on a movie screen before or since. Gilliam mixes Python’s anarchic, intellectual humour with Orwell, Kafka and Theatre Of The Absurd elements and comes up with something really special. John Sladek kinda sorta wrote some stories in a similar territory before this, and Dean Motter has written some comics since, but ‘Brazil’ is really in a world of its own!   [Infofreak]

‘Brazil’ is a visually magnificent film, brimming with unparalleled production design (by Norman Garwood), set direction (John Beard, Keith Pain) and costume design (James Acheson). Roger Pratt’s inventive cinematography beautifully captures a dark and menacing society that, at times, descends steeply into complete surrealism. The film’s enigmatic title refers to Ary Barroso’s catchy South American song, ‘Aquarela do Brasil {Watercolour of Brazil},’ which is a theme used frequently throughout the film, most noticeably during Sam’s dream sequences. The opening lyrics of the song go as follows: “Brazil / Where hearts were entertaining June / We stood beneath an amber moon / And softly murmured ‘someday soon’ / We kissed and clung together / Then, tomorrow was another day / The morning found me miles away / With still a million things to say.” Perhaps the film’s title, ‘Brazil,’ refers to this eternal place of bliss and happiness, a seemingly unreachable place under the brutal dictatorship of society.   [ackstasis]

One of the truest statements about originality in art comes from T.S. Eliot: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” Terry Gilliam is one of cinema’s mature poets. His “Brazil” features homages to numerous other films, ranging from “Modern Times” to “The Empire Strikes Back,” and its plot is broadly similar to “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” Yet the result is intriguingly fresh and creative….

I have noticed that most of the classic dystopian tales are fundamentally similar to one another. But “Brazil” approaches the genre in a uniquely psychological way. Sam Lowry is different from the standard protagonist who rebels against the government due to noble motives. He doesn’t seem to have any larger goals than his own personal ones. He isn’t trying to make the world a better place. He’s only longing for a better life for himself, one more exciting and romantic than the humdrum existence he currently occupies, where he’s beset by an overbearing mother, a pitiful boss, and a dull job. In the midst of this bureaucratic nightmare state, he cares only about such matters as getting his air conditioning fixed and stalking a female stranger who physically resembles his fantasy woman–or so he perceives. The woman, as played by Kim Greist, appears in his fantasies as a helpless damsel with long, flowing hair and a silky dress who sits in a cage while he battles a giant Samurai warrior. The real-life woman he pursues, also played by Greist, sports a butch haircut, drives a large truck, and has a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth.   [kylopod]

If you can, get the Criterion version of Brazil. It’s the film that Terry Gilliam intended you to see.   [bat-5]

The more you know about Brazil – the more you’re shocked. You think: “it’s Amazing. It’s at least 50M$ spent on sets for sure.” And then you find out, that almost ALL the surreal locations were shot in the real world. Sets are amazing despite the fact they are not sets at all.   [bcigar]

Alan Moore, writer of V for Vendetta, claims that most of science fiction’s future worlds are exaggerated takes on the present – social commentaries, given room to breathe. With this in mind few future worlds are as prescient as Brazil’s. Gillian’s neon-soaked world of office-bound worker drones, apathy, and the loss of freedom in the face of a terrorist threat is an almost eerie reflection of the current state of our world – 1984 with its tongue wedged firmly in its cheek.   [Kee_Nim_Mak_Mak]