Brazil (Director’s cut, 35mm)
“There are artists whose gift is to put down roots within the world of dreams… James Joyce did it in Finnegan’s Wake. Terry Gilliam, I believe, does something very like it in Brazil.” Salman Rushdie, American Film magazine, 1985.
Former Monty Python member Terry Gilliam was at his most ferociously inventive with Brazil, his third solo outing as a director. It follows dreamy pen-pusher (Jonathan Pryce) as he battles a menacing bureaucratic system in pursuit of his ideal woman. The film’s original title, 1984½, hints at the twin influences of George Orwell and director Federico Fellini, while Gilliam himself described it as “Frank Capra meets Franz Kafka”. With Robert DeNiro, Kim Greist, Katharine Helmond, Ian Holm, Bob Hoskins, Michael Palin, Jim Broadbent.
Low-level bureaucrat Sam Lowry (Pryce) escapes the monotony of his day-to-day life through a recurring daydream of himself as a virtuous hero saving a beautiful damsel. Investigating a case that led to the wrongful arrest and eventual death of an innocent man instead of wanted terrorist Harry Tuttle, he meets the woman from his daydream, and in trying to help her gets caught in a web of mistaken identities, mindless bureaucracy and lies.