This year marks forty years since the release of Brazil, the dystopian satire from Terry Gilliam, of Monty Python fame. Released early in 1985, this was a film that, in many ways, came out at exactly the right time.
The UK was in political turmoil, shifting from the stagnation of the 1970s, to the consumerism of Thatcherism. Less than a year earlier, in 1984, a new film adaptation of George Orwell's seminal dystopian novel set in that very year was released, in which the country is ruled by an all-powerful, omnipresent authoritarian regime. This heralded a renewed level of interest in the work and in how it had envisioned the future. Not only was there this direct adaptation, but a number of other works came out that played off much the same concepts and imagery.
A novel was published named 1985, where trade unions were portrayed as the real threat, whilst the graphic novel V for Vendetta depicted a Britain that had lurched towards fascism. Most famously, the ad for the new Apple Macintosh, directed by Ridley Scott, featured the same images of a dictators addressing brainwashed crowds. For a moment it seemed, Big Brother was Big Business.
Brazil can arguably be seen as another example in this wave, with its own depiction of an authoritarian surveillance state from which there appears no escape. On the face of it, the plot is in broad strokes much the same. In both, we follow someone who works for the government's Ministry of Information, who chooses to rebel through the simple act of finding love.
Clearly, it is very much riffing off Orwell's novel. Indeed, the film was originally titled ‘1984½'. What makes Gilliam's film stand out however is that it very much reads as a Pythonesque sending up of that work, with much the same brand of comedy. Whereas Nineteen Eighty-Four and similar works had functioned as bleak and nightmarish warnings about actual authoritarian regimes, Brazil instead is a satirical piece of modern fantasy that instead targets the bureaucracy and alienation found throughout all of modern society.
As such, Brazil is the film that feels most reflective of where the country actually was in the 1970s and 1980s, and arguably, is the more relevant to where we are today. The film has a lot to say about the modern age, including situations that are far more commonplace and humdrum than in other dystopias.
The film, which stars Jonathan Pryce, takes place in a brilliantly realised, surrealist landscape full of retro designs and fashions straight out of the 1920s, with magnificent art-deco architecture and huge concrete skyrises towering impossibly high. “Somewhere in the twentieth century” is all we are definitively told in the film's intro.
The dystopia found in this film is not one characterised by a Big Brother-like dictatorship. Indeed, whilst it is undoubtedly repressive, there are implications that this society may not even be that dissimilar to our own, if the television interviews with politicians putting everything in cricketing terms are anything to go by, not to mention the rampant consumerism. The enemy here is not a Party, but simply the System.
This is a world where bureaucracy has taken over to an absurd degree, where one cannot even attempt to fix the heating without filling out endless forms, and receipts, and receipts for receipts. Here, people are killed off not necessarily because of any act of rebellion against the regime, but because the incorrect name had been entered on a document. Instead of the ruthless efficiency seen in other dystopias, this is a world where nothing works – full of pipes and ducts, needlessly overcomplicated household items, botched plastic surgeries, with the entire plot being kicked off through a simple administrative mistake.
The whole film has a frenetic, absurdist tone, every scene being filled with bizarre, over-the-top characters who seem to have walked straight out of a Python film. Much of the comedy comes from how the madness that is on display is juxtaposed with the way in which everyone cheerfully carries on as normal; from the scene in which diners at a restaurant casually go on eating after a terrorists bomb goes off, to Michael Palin's character, who appears to be as friendly and as ordinary as only Palin can be, whilst simultaneously being employed as a torturer and interrogator. There's a brilliant Catch-22 style twisting of logic, as in one scene where Palin's character explains he did not get the wrong man, but rather “had the wrong man delivered to him as the right man.”
Jonathan Pryce plays a character, Sam, who feels utterly trapped, dreaming of himself as a shining knight saving the damsel in distress, fighting off the various ogres that represent his daily obstacles in some incredibly well-realised fantasy sequences typical of Gilliam's work. Entirely overwhelmed by the bizarre and nonsensical society around him, he scrambles to maintain some kind of control whilst different aspects of his life derail in ever more chaotic fashions. The authorities around him are portrayed as almost hysterical in their determination to clamp down on any dissent, guns blazing at the slightest of transgressions and enforcing the most arbitrary of rules, whilst nevertheless remaining petty and bureaucratic in their aims. It's a stifling system, but unlike with other dystopias, it's one where there is barely any overriding logic. It's not so much about power, as following the rules of the game.
It's on this level where the film has perhaps aged the best. Indeed, in spite of its retro aesthetic, with computers that look more like typewriters, and the 40s dress sense, it still feels highly relevant to the modern world of algorithms, captchas, and cookies, in which most people blithely hand over their personal data to vast, international corporations we know are probably evil. At so many moments in recent years, throughout lockdowns and economic upheavals, it has become startlingly clear that only do those in power not necessarily have our best interests at heart, but perhaps worse, many are simply incompetent, not really knowing what they are doing themselves.
This chaos is what Brazil captures brilliantly. Moments such as those where Sam struggles with ridiculous pieces of tech that seem to get progressively more out of order are scenes that feel highly prescient. The same too could be said of the scene with the numbered menu, which feels like it's only lacking a line about the characters having to scan a QR code. Other moments also stand out as only more relevant now – the instances of terrorist attacks seen throughout the film, for example, or the implication that these are being manipulated by the authorities.
Unlike in other dystopian films, it seems there has been no actual revolution implemented to create this world. There has been no outright takeover by fascists, nor some other apocalyptic event. Rather, it's simply an extension of what we already see in our own reality, pushed past the point of absurdity. It's for this reason, the film still works as well as it does, 40 years on.
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