Brazil review

 Number 299 on the top 1000 films of all time is Terry Gillam's dystopian black comedy drama Brazil.

Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) is a low-level bureaucrat in an unnamed dystopian future. He frequently dreams of saving a mystery woman from death. When a typing errors results in the erroneous death of cobbler Archibald Buttle, instead of rogue heating engineer Archibald Tuttle (Robert De Niro) Lowry tries to undo the mistake which brings him into contact with the woman he has been dreaming about.

Surreal? Arthouse? Experimental? A satirical look at the modern world? However you look at it, there is no denying that Brazil is a weird film. Made by Terry Gillam and co-starring Michael Palin, it was a bit like a twisted Monty Python misadventure. Rather than one cohesive narrative, the film jumped from surreal scene to surreal scene - we have Sam Lowry dreaming of being a winged warrior saving a woman from falling to her death, the next we jump to Archibald Buttle being arrested and sentenced to death and then Sam is fighting this massive robotic samurai. It really was just bizarre and after a while the weirdness all became a bit much. I just don't have the patience for it. Maybe if there was an obvious deeper meaning than I would get it, but it just seemed like it was being weird for the sake of being weird.

Having said that, Terry Gillam was inspired by 1984, despite having never read it. Gillam was also highly inspired by Fellini and I could see his influence here. Brazil was like a grotesque parody of both Fellini's work and of 1984. Lowry is the stand-in for Winston Smith, another low-level bureaucrat stuck in a totalitarian system. It's not Big Brother and Emmanuel Goldstein, but it is dystopic nonetheless. The origins of this world are not explored in any great detail, but there is an over-reliance on technology which usually malfunctions. And *spoiler alert* just when it looks like Lowry has escaped and will live happily ever after, it was all a torture-inspired hallucination.

And I know this was in the eighties, but the special effects looked awful. From the tinny explosions to the flamethrowers that were obviously painted paper, they really looked like they were from a cheap B-film. Terry Gillam has referred to this as the second in his trilogy of imagination, and it was nominated for best original screenplay. There is no doubt that this was an original, imaginative film. Confusing, surreal and abstract, but definitely original. I can safely say that I haven't seen anything like it before.