Brazil (1985)

Maybe it’s just indicative of my ‘ornry’ personality but the most interesting, engaging thing about Terry Gilliam’s Brazil is the ‘custody battle’ that surrounded its American release.
Now none of even it’s most ardent supporters/fans would suggest that this film was a commercial motherlode and even in pre-production it would have been clearly far-out and an ‘acquired taste’; I use that term specifically- I don’t think there’s anything about the film that’s beyond the average person’s conception or imagination BUT it’s very arch, exceedingly bleak in places, phantasmagorical and emotional yet illogical. But then, that goes for most Terry Gilliam films.
The obvious point being that this was not something a studio like Universal should have touched with barge-pole. Studio head- Sid Sheinberg, to many the literal godfather of the ‘blockbuster‘ and Steven Spielberg (metaphorically), saw what Universal probably chipped in half the budget for (5-7mill), and saw something they would struggle to sell. (So would I… There’s a completely tenuous reason for the film to be called Brazil for starters. Don’t ask me what I’d call it… ‘The Steampunk Bureaucracy’…’‘1985’?!).
Something pertinent (I feel) that gets left out of the discussion of that mild skirmish is that in 1985, there was no studio-‘art-house’ labels like Focus Pictures or Fox Searchlight, that would underwrite this sort of kooky, medium-scale film for your overseas markets and Western pseudo-intellectuals like me.
If you can’t already tell, I’m not the greatest fan of Terry Gilliam movies; I always feel like I should like them more then I do. I think he’s a great visionary stylist and he made a significant contribution to comedy with Python, which gave birth to more DIY dark animated comedy, and he’s a massively charismatic public figure but I have trouble dialling into his movies and Brazil is no different.
But I have to give the man credit for landing this purposely convoluted with a lot of different messages like homeland security and surveillance, bureaucratic superstructures and the day-job and as well as this, the film is set in this world of 30’s/40’s style with 80’s technology. It’s not for me but he created a British fantasy epic.
The delicious irony in the American battle for control of Brazil, that this film about getting lost on the industrial ladder and fighting against it, managed to break free from its creatively corrupt overseers and blossom due to grass roots support for it…

I watched Brazil (1985) on BBC2.
My 2011 in Movies will return with Touching The Void (2003)...