Did I mention that I really, really like this movie?
I must not be an UCG.
Brazil is the best conservative movie ever made.
It shows a world where everything is too big and complicated for it’s own good, especially the government. I’m a die-hard liberal and I still love dit.
Btw, what’s the “Love Conquers all” Ending?
The one I saw involved an increasingly implausible escape from the building, then an escape with the girl.
Then we cut to Palin and his boss, remarking that they’ve lost him. Our hero is catatonic in the torture chair.
I nominated this character in a recent thread here as the scariest movie villain of all time.
Menocchio, the infamous “Love Conquers All” version isn’t even properly an alternate ending. It’s more of a truncation, and unless I’m very much mistaken, it was originally hacked up (like a feline throat-clearing) for broadcast television. It’s only ninety minutes long, and ends when Julia and Sam flee to the country. Sam daydreams about them flying free, happy as songbirds. Roll credits. La la la.
Well, I guess it does say “spoilers” in the thread title.
That’s the most important change by far, but there are several differences between the versions. The butchered version actually includes some shots and dialogue that weren’t in the original.
http://us.imdb.com/AlternateVersions?0088846
Menocchio, are you whooshing? A conservative movie probably would have played down the materialism and class differences.
Peg. perhaps you must be striking.
Potter, if the means to “happiness” is a forced lobotomy, I’d call that a downbeat ending.
Larry Mudd, Why would you say “Brazil” is Oedipal? merely because Sam and Jill consummate their relationship on his mother’s bed, after Jill puts on his mother’s wig and nightgown? Or is it because he imagines his mother turning into Jill? I think Gilliam denies any Freudian implication to this in his DVD commentary. (I loaned my DVDs to a friend.) He also denies being influenced by “1984”.
Why is it, then?
From The Battle of Brazil:
“The original idea for an opening was to follow the flight of a beetle from the midst of a forest that was being felled by giant lumber machines to an office in the Ministry of Information Retrieval where it would be smashed against the ceiling and drop into a computer printer, setting off the Kafkaesque chain of events that this story is about. It was one of the many elaborate images Gilliam sacrificed to stay on budget.”
I’m not sure there’s anything specifically Brazilian about that opening, unless LM was thinking of a rainforest/deforestation motif.
I’m still searching for the best quote that explains the title. It’s related to the song which plays, in different versions, throughout the movie. It has the same sort of attitude as Sam’s fantasies; bouncy, but unrealistically joyful.
The book has a list of alternate titles that were suggested by the studio that has to be read to be believed. And there are some fascinating names of actors who were considered for the roles of Sam and Jill.
Geez, sorry to keep you in suspense, Rilch, that’s kind of mean.
Gilliam said that he wanted to start with a nice slow pan across idyllic Brazilian rainforest, which eventually arrives at a section which is being torn down by heavy machinery. A tree falls “at the feet” of the camera’s POV, and among the debris that is kicked up, we find our fly. While the titles roll, the camera tracks his flight away and across the sea, over the dystopian city, and into an open window in the Ministry of Information, setting off the whole unfortunate chain of events. Sort of like Lorenz’ butterfly effect, only with a somewhat ignoble insect, I guess.
You just about ‘whooshed’ me there… …but you left out that Katherine Helmond dubbed the voice for ‘Jill’ in the dream sequences, and that Jill echoes his mother’s words about his Christmas gift (“Something for an executive”) when she presents herself to him in the morning, nekkid but for a big ol’ ribbon— and the creepy plastic surgeon’s remark to Sam “Come on, you’ve seen your mother naked…” etc.
Hey, talking of weird parental stuff, DeNiro’s character resonated pretty well for me when I first saw Brazil– partly because my pop’s name is Harry Archibald Taylor, (nicknamed ‘Hut’,) and at 15 I still had a pretty heroic image of the ol’ bastard.
(previews)
Robot Arm, I’m sure I read about the idea being specifically “a rainforest in Brazil”, because I remember thinking “But the title doesn’t really make a lot of sense without that.” Of course, that memory is over ten years old now, and I’ve more recently read that the image he had in his mind was of someone sitting on a deckchair listening to Brazil, totally placid, completely isolated from the madness and confusion that’s going on a short distance away… so I should probably be more careful with declarative statements like that.
Rereading that quote, Robot Arm, I’m really hoping that I read something in another source to justify that, and didn’t simply unconsciously elaborate on those two sentences until it became a new idea that only existed in my head. Because that would be embarrassing.
I see. Thank you!
I believe in the DVD commentary Gilliam does specifically mention a rainforest in Brazil as the source of the bug.
Funny, I took it to be an attack on big business - where the corporations of the world, unchecked, had infiltrated and replaced big government with their own horrible beaurocracy. Sort of a capitalist 1984.
I see it as an attack on burocracy in general.
The paperwork, the systems and the structures that become entrenched and inflexible. Those 27 B stroke 6 (I think that was it) forms required to continue… the stamp countersigning the previous stamp. All that lovely shuffling of paperwork are the the halmarks of burocracy gone wild…
Gilliam had one thing really right. In the 80s everyone was talking about a paperless society. Here we are a decade and a bit later and the paper is in even bigger piles.
By the way I had a “Brazilian” experence in my college days. I had a student loan with the bank and was given $11 000 for the year divided into two payments . As I had pre paid my tuition that was enought to live off of. Turns out the bank paid my tuition again and left me with $256 for the first half of the year.
When I went to get this corrected… I found that every one I spoke to said the bank was right because the computers showed that $256 was all I was entitled to. I explained that the tution had already been paid for and they told me that I was wrong as the institution accepted the payment.
It took me two weeks to get the money after seeing several dozen people and filling out many bits of paperwork.
Turned out the person I dealt with accidentally clicked on the wrong box on her computer…
Good thing I filled out a 27 B stroke 6
Relying on memory because I’ve loaned my DVDs:
Gilliam had the song in mind when he named the film, as Robert Arm wrote. Tom Stoppard introduced Larry Mudd’s rainforest sequence in his rewrite. Gilliam loved the idea but couldn’t justify the cost. He talks about this on the DVD, as LateComer wrote. So, everyone’s right! Except possibly me.
This would have brilliantly setup the film. We have a flying insect brought into the oppressive society and crushed. Then we have Sam trying to fly away into freedom.
Ever watch Yes, (Prime) Minister?
It’s one of my favorite British comedies. Even though I don’t get all the references, the underlying theme is that beauracracy is pretty much the same on both sides of the pond.
Gilliam is American, but his humor is heavily British-influenced, so it’s no great surprise that he’d take on the same subject as another British comedy. (And at about the same time, too.)
But the similarity ends there. Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister are brilliant shows, but they portray beauracracy as being ineffectual and ultimately benign. In Brazil it’s clearly evil.
Now, where did Amethyst run off to?
This is probably the correct interpretation of the movie. I would base that statement on the short film The Crimson Permanent Assurance, which Gilliam directed, that opens The Meaning of Life.
This is one of the movies I’ve never seen, but wanted to. The problem being that every time I go to the video rental place, I’m pretty much always going with a friend, with plans to see something else.
So, question: there’s been talk of different versions. When I go and rent the plain ol’ VHS of this movie, what will I be getting?