Thirty Five Years Ago - Brazil

Admittedly there are still some films coming out this year (and I’ll get on to those at some point) but, compared to your standard non-pandemicy year, they are definitely fewer and farther between this year. So given that a fair chunk of this here blog-type thing is given over to unnecessary wallowing in unprovoked nostalgia, let’s carry on that on as a theme for this little run (a quite frankly not surprising or unexpected follow up to the recent Forty Years Ago thread) because, let’s face it, it’s just pretty easy, innit?

Brazil (1985)
Dir. Terry Gilliam
Dur. 142 mins (unless you’re watching the 92 minute TV version with the happy ending)

What’s It About? In a nightmarish dystopian alternate ‘80s, a fly in a teleprinter sets off a chain of bureaucratic events that leads Sam Lowry on a quest to find the woman of his dreams while trying to avoid inadvertently becoming an enemy of the state.

Why’s It Any Good? For me, this is Terry Gilliam as co-writer and director at the height of his powers. There’s the gleeful obsession with the ludicrous absurdities of everyday tedium combined with the sweeping dreamlike fantasy visions that powered his cartoons and animations. It’s a film that very nearly never saw the light of day as he intended and was to become the first of many occasions where Gilliam would battle the studio over what he saw as unjust interference with an artists trying to deliver his vision (not something that the Hollywood is overly geared up for unless said artist has already proven themselves as a mighty draw at the box office). The resultant battle and indeed has filled a book - The Battle of Brazil: Terry Gilliam v. Universal Pictures in the Fight to the Final Cut by Jack Mathews is a great account of Gilliam’s struggles to get the film as he wanted out there (which, at one point, included taking out a full page ad in Variety asking the studio execs when his film would be released).

It’s got a great cast - Jonathan Pryce holds the whole thing together as Sam Lowry, the man who just wants to be part of the dystopian machine but finds himself increasingly drawn into unwilling insurrection, but the supporting cast are great too including Katherine Helmond (of Soap fame) as Sam’s plastic surgery addicted mother and fellow Python Michael Palin as a chillingly avuncular torturer. The design is, as you would expect from a man with an eye for look and feel, also striking in  horrifying bleak way; said bleakness also extending out to the ending which, in its original form, it’s not the sort of ending you’d expect in an 80s Hollywood film.

Being set in alternate 80s but with a kind of 50s aesthetic gives it a sort of timelessness that means it holds up well today; depressingly more so as the bureaucratic dystopia seems just as, if not more, plausible at the moment.In some ways, it’s often not an enjoyable film but it is a film that I love very much.

Hard to believe that this came out in the same year as some of my next choices...