Brazil

Terry Gilliam’s dark and ironic futuristic world depicts a smothered, impoverished society that has lost all personal freedom under an out-of-control government and overwhelming bureaucracy. Gilliam is a former member of British comedy legends and masters of the surreal, Monty Python, and the visual influence and madness of the Python world is evident in Brazil (1985). For instance, the whole plot starts absurdly when someone swats an insect, which falls dead into a typewriter, causing it to type the name ‘Buttle’ instead of ‘Tuttle’, the name of a terrorist. Poor Buttle is then arrested, tortured and killed.

Brazil presents a Kafkaesque vision of the future. It is set in the 20th century but at some imagined time that never actually existed. Sam Lowry, played by Jonathan Pryce, is a dreamy bureaucrat, tired of being controlled by the Government and whose only aspiration is to find the woman of his dreams. However, things get a little complicated when he inadvertently becomes an enemy of the State, wrongfully accused of being a terrorist. Lowry’s mother is a typical member of a shallow and frivolous society, obsessed by plastic surgery – 20 years after the film was made, these obsessions are tellingly evident in our own society.

Many theories have been put forward about Brazil: that it pokes fun at sci-fi action movies like Star Wars, that it is a comment on Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s governments, or that its running theme of bad luck is a comment on the Butterfly Effect. Whatever the truth is, Brazil remains one of the most challenging and intriguing science fiction films.