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Brazil

© Andrej Ristic

The movie that I am going to talk about today was written by Terry Gilliam and Tom Stoppard. Gilliam was the worst actor of the Monty Phyton bunch, but also the one with many incredible ideas, the one that wrote and drew every cartoon in the series. Tom Stoppard is a character that I first encountered at the Greatest English Writers of 20th Century, English class at the university.

Brazil, directed by Terry Gilliam is a story about kafkaesque world in a first place. I have read a few reviews, and all of them are comparing it to 1984, the work that is related to this one only in a sense that both talk about evil, totalitarian regime, have a same premise, butvery different development and style. It is a story about completely bureaucratic society where punishment for not filing something properly can be death.

Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce), is a meek, unimportant clerk, who works at a computer terminal (that looks as if it came from an acid trip altogether with Sam's office) all day, feeling stuck, his life looks stuck, the only consolation he finds is in his dreams where he is a mighty knight saving a beautiful princess, flying over the problems of everyday life (probably put in as a reference to James Joyce's Portrait of an Artist). As his house support mechanisms begin to fail, he is unable to repair them, after all, he needs to get a certain form filled and verified, but Robert De Niro character jumps in and helps him as an illegal freelance repairman that is on the other side of the law because he does not respect the bureaucracy behind the life. Then Sam sees the girl of his dreams in reality and is determined to get to her.

Brazil's main story is much like 1984, but approach, setting and the way of telling the story remind of Frantz Kafka, more than anyone else. Since Phytons belong to the sixties, the movie does have some elements of the anarchic vision that predicts cultural fall of the western civilisation.

Roger Ebert mentions something about that there are some scenes in the movie, 'it's as if Gilliam sat down and wrote out all of his fantasies, heedless of production difficulties, and then they were filmed - this time, heedless of sense.' I do not understand that, the movie is perfectly clear, from its references to Homer, to its references to its writer's

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