Gilliam's Brazil (spoilers)

Cafe Society
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I’ll take a stab at this though it is Only my oppinion. The scene actually takes place before Sam finds Jill. First we see Sam driving then we cut to a pan down this wonderful clean futuristic (retro futuristic) street only to find out we are panning through a model. The Drunk ruins the illusion (Like in the scene in 12 monkeys where the scientists pop up and reveal the ocean background to be merely a painting) and suddenly we see this dream community for what it really is, a bunch of cruddy garbage strewn flats. Another contrasting of the dream with the reality done in this movie.

Sam is an interesting character, not a hero in any real sense. The scene that shows the director didn’t want us to think Sam is noble is in the glass subway scene. Before he begins to fantasise, watch the scene. Every man is seated and not one offers their seat to the one legged pregnant woman standing in front of Sam.

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Drat! The concept sounded really cool and it sounded like a great complement to Life of Brian.

Since Good Omens appears to be a book, I’ll just have to go find it so I can read it.

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One of the best decisions you’ll make this year is to read Good Omens. It’s one of the funniest books you’ll ever read.

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I have it on DVD. Anyone who enjoys fantasy films but sometimes wish they had a more cynical edge should give this a shot. It’s visually interesting and filled with surprising twists and turns (it’s Gilliam, after all) and has some interesting actors in supporting roles (Sean Connery, John Cleese and a few familiar faces from “Brazil”.)

That said, it never engaged me emotionally. There are images that have stuck in my head from that film, but not much feeling. Brazil is one of the most affecting films I’ve ever seen.

Looks like kingpengvin nailed it, but it might also serve as a bit of foreshadowing. The model shows cooling towers camouflaged, not altogether successfully, to blend in with blue skies and fluffy white clouds. At the end of the film, the faces of Sam’s captors interrupt his blue-sky fantasy and reveal (to us, anyway) that he is still in the interrogation room (which, oddly enough, is located inside a cooling tower).

Also, the drunk looking over the model could represent the out-of-control bureaucracy looming over the oppressed citizenry.

Then again, he could represent the oppressed citizenry, hypnotized by unattainable dreams and unfulfilled promises. (He can’t actually touch the model.)

Unattainable dreams? Maybe the drunk is Sam.

Only Gilliam (or perhaps one of the co-writers) could say definitively interpretation, if any, is correct, and he might lie about it, anyway.

And despite or because of that, I find myself identifying with him much more than most film heroes.

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A few questions:
Who exactly is Tuttle? Why does he kill the two mechanics? Are there really any “terrorists”?

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My brilliant analyses might be more impressive if I would proofread more carefully. Instead of ibid, read kingpengvin. I did not mean to attribute the second quote to gobear. In my first draft I quoted kingpengvin more than once.

Minor note: the sentence before that should have a “which” after the word “definitively”.

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A rogue heating engineer; a former Central Services employee who rebelled against the bureaucracy; a terrorism suspect whose records get mixed up with Buttle’s, with tragic results.

They represent the “enemy” to him.

This is a good question. Clearly innocent people, such as Jill, are accused of terrorism, and it’s possible all the explosions are (a) set by the government to keep the populace in a state of paranoid dependence, or (b) a result of problems in the incredibly complex and innefficient infrastructure. In the longer versions of the film, Sam blurts out toward the end, “I am not a terrorist!”, although by that point he has caused or been complicit in at least three deaths that I can think of off-hand, and he later helps destroy the Ministry building (and the people in it), if only in his imagination.

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** Amethyst ** definitely read Good Omens. It’s by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.

It got me hooked on both writers.

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“A rogue heating engineer; a former Central Services employee who rebelled against the bureaucracy; a terrorism suspect whose records get mixed up with Buttle’s, with tragic results.”
I know but what I wanted to know is whether he was supposed to be a terrorist. The fact that he killed the two mechanics would seem to indicate so regardless of anything else he did.

And like you said Sam, when he kills the guards, **has** become something like a terrorist which does tend to blunt the message somewhat . The deaths caused by Sam and Tuttle would seem to justify to some extent what the Ministry does (though of course its methods are still excessively cruel). Is that what Gilliam intended?
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As I said on a previous topic, I think only Gilliam can definitively explain Gilliam’s intentions, and he’s a confessed liar.

I think you’re meant to question to what extent the ministry or central services’ actions justify Sam and Tuttle’s, and vice versa. How much our are perceptions shaped by labels? Jack sees Tuttle as a terrorist, Sam sees him as a hero. Does defining him as one or the other mean we no longer have to consider his actions on their own merits? Does seeing the repairmen drown in sewage make you laugh, cheer, or squirm? Why? Contrast Sam’s reaction when he inadvertently causes the death of a policeman or suspects Jill of setting off an explosion with his glee at watching two men die a particularly nasty death.

This is not a “Hollywood” film with clearly defined heroes and villains and a script that tells you want to think. The antagonists are doing their jobs (although not very well, for the most part), the protagonists are far from perfect, and more questions are raised than answered.

“Terrorism” in the film may be (a) a fabrication to justify the intrusive and oppressive bureaucratic apparatus, (b) a coverup for the government’s mistakes, © a real concern that has been blown way out of proportion for cynical reasons (d) something that the society’s leaders wrongly but honestly believe to be a bigger problem than it is – it can’t be OUR fault everything keeps going wrong (e) something the government has actually created or encouraged through the very means supposed to prevent it, or (e) some combination of the above.

I’m talking about the film, here, of course.

On another note, isn’t it interesting that we never glimpse or hear reference to any authority higher than a deputy minister? It’s as if there really is no center.

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Um, for “How much our are” read to “How much are our”, for “want to think” read “what to think”, sprinkle in some more commas and for the second (e) read (f). The sad thing is I do use “preview”.

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I’m disappointed that Gilliam’s take on Don Quixote never made it to screen. But I’ve heard the documentary (Lost in La Mancha) about its trip to oblivion is interesting, and gives some insight into Gilliam’s way of thinking about things.

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Everyone here seems to take it as a given that Tuttle killed the two Central Services engineers-- I didn’t get that at all. He caused their environment suits to fill up with sewage and then burst like balloons. There’s no reason to think that they would have drowned in that short time, and certainly Sam’s reactions as he watched through the periscope were more in line with seeing his antagonists thoroughly humiliated than seeing them murdered. Or did I miss something?

Similarly, it was clearly not Sam’s intention to kill his pursuers-- when he detached the trailer, he was just trying to place an obstacle between themselves and forces which he believed (with good reason) were going to kill an innocent girl merely because she was an embarassment to them. He was jubilant until he saw one of the police engulfed in flames, at which point his eyes widen and he says, “Oh, no…”

As for the existence of real terrorists, I’ve always suspected that there are none, and that the explosions are, as TWDuke suggests, “a result of problems in the incredibly complex and innefficient infrastructure.” Nobody except for Central Services is allowed to do any maintenance, Central Services clearly can’t meet the demand, and even when they have the necessary labour, their hands are tied by Kafkaesque paperwork requirements. Every surface seems to conceal a hopelessly tangled spaghetti of utility services, and the movie opens with the suggestion that manufacturers are more concerned with the superficialities that motivate consumer choice than any sort of practical standards-- followed by a massive explosion. Given these circumstances, you would expect natural-gas explosions to be as common as dirt. Maybe a bit of a reach, but at times I think that the gas-jets that erupt from the nightmare-samurai’s wounds might be a hint about the nature of the “enemy.” When Sam “slays” the giant, he finds that under its helmet, it has his face. This could be taken to reflect that he is participating in a giant system which is responsible for fourteen years of gas-explosions, all-the-while expending tremendous amounts of energy struggling against a chimerical enemy, never guessing that the “enemy” is the system itself.

On preview, I see that TWDuke has made parts of this post redundant. C’est la vie.

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If they didn’t drown they may have died from any of the raw sewage related diseases down the road.

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Brazil is perhaps my all-time favorite film.

A couple of things real quick, hopefully I will have time to post more soon:

  • I agree with Larry Mudd, the Tuttle scene with the two central service inspectors should be viewed as mischievous not murderous.

  • My understanding for what happened with the Gilliam version of Good Omens is that the movie was supposed to be a joint American/British collaboration, but financing fell through on the American side. Pity because it really seemed like the perfect project for him. Hopefully Gilliam will get a chance to make Good Omen eventually.

  • In my opinion the best version is the Directors Cut on DVD, the added scenes are excellent and clear up the ending. No reason they should ever have been cut really.

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I can highly recommend Lost in La Mancha. It’s both very funny (Gilliam directing the “giants” is priceless) and deeply heartbreaking (as the money evaporates, and the project along with it). Very informative about the filmmaking process; you’ll wonder how any movie gets made at all.

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bump

I saw Brazil in a theater today, at Symphony Space in Manhattan. I think the version shown was the European/Japanese video version mentioned in the Brazil FAQ link above, as it didn’t have clouds at the opening and it showed the “bow around nekked Jill” scene.

After this most recent viewing, I was wondering about certain parts of the story, thought my fellow Dopers might have good things to say, searched for a relevant thread, and here I am.

Some thoughts:

Tuttle is a terrorist because he works on the systems that Central Services is supposed to work on. That is the extent of his terrorism. The bureaucracy publicly equates terrorism with the bombings, but Tuttle is a terrorist in that he shows the bureaucracy for what it is: ineffectual. He goes in and fixes heating systems while Central Services personnel are still dealing with the paperwork. That such expenditures are taken to arrest and torture him (or in this case, the unfortunate Mr. Buttle), exemplify the misguidedness and wastefulness of the bureaucracy. Of course, in order to defray the cost, the victims pay the bill.

Jill knows that Information Retrieval made a mistake, and for attempting to set things straight (through official channels, no less) she is suspected of being a terrorist. That alone is the reason for the suspicion (although Sam makes it worse by forcing her to drive through a stopping station). Once again, the bureaucracy worries itself over someone relatively unimportant, and the papers accumulate to address a problem originally caused by an error in paperwork.

I think that there is no terrorist group. The explosions are either intentionally caused by the bureaucracy to perpetuate the fear of terrorists and thereby enforce the belief in the importance of the penal system and the bureaucracy governing it (as even the penal system is part of the bureaucratic ministry “Information Retrieval”), or they are accidents caused by the inefficacy of Central Services and are blamed on terrorists for the same reason.

Sam, despite his noble dreaming, is a victim of the system, as he suspects Jill of being a bomb-toting terrorist after Jack tells him she’s “working for somebody, and she’s not working for us”, he tries to save Jill by initially going through official channels and later tries to fudge the books, and even in his final fantasy, imagines Tuttle to be a bomb-planter, as he blows up the Information Retrieval building shortly after escaping interrogation.

Unfortunately for Sam, his final defiance against the system is a delusion.

Brazil is a great movie, and it was good to finally see it on the big screen.