150 Word Review: 'Brazil' (1985)
Have you got a 27B stroke 6?
The dreamy ballad “Brazil” is woven throughout Terry Gilliam’s influential sci-fi masterpiece of the same name. It's a song about hope, and there is none in Gilliam's soul-crushing future. In Brazil, the former Monty Python member builds a paranoid society addicted to failing technology and torn apart by terrorism. And in this world, we meet Jonthan Pryce's Sam Lowry, a low-level bureaucrat who works for the all-powerful government and dreams of finding love. Even fascists yearn for something better.
The visuals are sumptuous: stunning fantasy sequences and brutal urban hellscapes. The comedy is sinister. In one scene, Katherine Helmond, as Sam's meddling mother, has her face pulled like a fruit roll-up by a plastic surgeon. In another, bleeding waitstaff scramble to protect the well-to-do from having their lunches inconvenienced by a bombing. Later, a government secretary cheerfully transcribes the screams of someone being tortured. In the end, “Brazil” plays forever.
More Gilliam: ‘12 Monkeys’ (1995)
But is it horror?