From the archive: "Brazil"

Easy to see why the executives hated Terry Gilliam's futureshock opus Brazil: populated by grey suits on concrete sets, it devotes at least its first hour not to the flamboyant, freehand fantasy of which the director is so clearly capable, but to the business of scrupulous office drone Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) as he goes about trying to rectify the bureaucratic error that saw Archibald Buttle, rather than his namesake Tuttle, rounded up and carted off by totalitarian troops. Lowry's dreams of flights and freedom fighters suggest a Billy Liar-like desire to escape, but he's repeatedly ground down by the bastards around him - Ian Holm as a needy middle-manager; Robert de Niro and Bob Hoskins as varyingly threatening rival contractors; Michael Palin as a company man with a dark side - and random terrorist atrocities that play as well 20 years on (in the era of Muslim extremists) as they must have done upon first release (at the time of the IRA).

The title, and the office workers' choice of desktop viewing, suggest a rewrite of Casablanca via the gloominess of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. If Brazil was always going to be too deadpan and offbeam to satisfy huge audiences (its idea of a romantic come-on is the line "care for a little necrophilia?", which is inspired in the context), the completeness of its vision really does grow on you, given some patience and close attention, and this oddly realistic sci-fi movie manages to see at least a few things to come, with a strain of corporate absurdity that was to continue through to The Office. There's something cherishably perverse about the whole project, in fact. You suspect the studio wanted a sci-fi of scale, to sit alongside the then-prominent Terminator and Back to the Future movies; what Gilliam delivered was a dystopian fable about the petty frustrations and irritations of modern life.

Brazil is second only to Blade Runner amongst 1980s films in putting up on screen a world where nothing - not the screwy plumbing, nor the malfunctioning electrics - really works as it should. This equally applies to Gilliam's (or is it the studio's?) ending, which remains a mess, but amongst its otherwise supremely organised disorganised clutter, there's a wealth of left-of-centre detail that probably needs two or three viewings to absorb fully: to take but one fifteen-minute segment, we get fresh-air dispensers, men in chemical suits playing volleyball, and kids receiving credit cards as Christmas gifts from shopping-mall Santas. Gilliam junks the utopian ideals of so much sci-fi in favour of a good-humored pessimism about the direction in which humanity was heading: as time goes by, he reckons here, things don't get any better.

(September 2007)

Brazil screens on BBC2 this Friday at 11.50pm.