Brazilliant

One of the most cliched aspects of my life lies in the fact that it was George Orwell's dystopian masterpiece '1984' which really got me into reading. I've met many people who were similarly inspired by Orwell and (without ever being ashamed of my love for his work) have always been slightly weary of its predictability as a 'modern classic', feeling that presenting myself to the world as a fan of Orwell casted me as somehow humorless and needlessly earnest.

It was my love of '1984' which recently led me to buy the film 'Brazil', a dystopian nightmare whose working title was '1984 1/2' (Nineteen Eighty Four and a Half).

But, the brilliance of 'Brazil' (Brazilliance, if you will) lies in its comic sensibility, its absurdly brilliant satire. Just as we should expect from director and ex-Python Terry Gilliam (co-written with Tom Stoppard, no less) it is dark, weird and hilarious in equal measure. Although occasionally the satire is ladled on a little too thickly, this is quickly forgotten as you sink into the lavish retro-futuristic sets and the wonderfully astute performances from a stellar cast (Jonathan Pryce, Robert De Niro, Michael Palin, Bob Hoskins to name just a few).

The real strength of Gilliam's 'Brazil' is that, unlike Orwell's vision of a slick, all-powerful totalitarian state, the powers-that-be in Brazil are often incompetent, work-shy, buck-passers. In 'Brazil', there is no Big Brotheresque villian. Rather, the enemy is bureaucracy itself, the nightmare is the nature of administration. Seen in this light, it is '1984' that reads like a wildly imaginative fantasy and 'Brazil' as a disturbingly realistic documentary.

I wholly recommend this film and am surprised it hasn't been packaged alongside the other Python masterpiece 'The Life of Brian'. In fact, watching 'Brazil', you're reminded that the best jokes in LoB are those that satirise administration and bureaucracy:

"Judean People's Front? Fuck off! We're the People's Front of Judea!"