Brazil (1985)

United Kingdom
directed by: Terry Gilliam
written by: Terry Gilliam, Tom Stoppard, Charles McKeown
starring: Jonathan Pryce, Robert De Niro, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm, Bob Hoskins, Michael Palin
seen: 17th March, 2009 - comment: 27th September, 2017

Oh my, this is difficult. I've been trying for over a week now to come up with a description for feelings left in me by Brazil. Seven years ago I wrote that it's probably the best Gilliam, that I want pipes in my apartment to breathe and whine and that it's one of my "heart" movies. None of those things are valid today. I'd say that the best Gilliam piece is "Twelve Monkeys", I like silence in my apartment since there's nothing romantic about lunacy, and for those reasons and more my heart likes other things now.

But since it got me thinking about "Monkeys", lets compare those two films. Their are both about a bleak future forced upon people by other people, they both connect hopes for deliverance with an idealized femme fatale and both of them in the end deny a mere possibility of redemption. And they are both more or less accurate and more or less selfconfessed adaptations of other artworks, both of which are perfect idols in their respective genres (1984 in case of Brazil and The Pier/La Jetée in case of Twelve Monkeys).

They both deviate from the source and come up with new and own ideas, shifting the meaning in process. But while "Monkeys" keep inspiring me with each new viewing and are therefore timeless, Brazil stays the same and therefore a distance emerges between my inner life and the film's message. For example, nowadays I notice how suppresed and ingenuine the character of Jill is. The scene where she is reduced to long hair and a showing nipple is completely ridiculous. But a whole other bunch of details is great, so I'm not spitting real sulphur here. And I certainly find interesting how the film is visually beautiful and rich in imagination and still perfectly captures the shabbiness and mediocrity of the world that Gilliam mocks so mercilessly.