Brazil

(1985, Dir.: Terry Gilliam, with Jonathan Pryce, Kim Greist)

My goal is to write this review without invoking the “d” word. You know, the one that rhymes with “bystopian.” Fortunately, I’ve got another “d” word handy and it’s even thematically relevant and stuff: ducts.

More Kafka meets Conrad than Orwell, Brazil is a rage against the bureaucratic machine. There are no beginnings or ends, just middles. Ducts are pervasive: the film opens on a television advertisement for ducts that is interrupted by an explosion of an endless bombing campaign, which may be real or may be the monolithic Central Planning’s device for keeping the masses in line (does Gilliam nod knowingly to himself when visiting New York at the appearance of signs asking subway passengers to be on the lookout for suspicious packages?); ducts sprawl through scenes like inorganic webbing, sustaining life, perhaps, but reducing it to a prisonlike existence.

Trapped therein is midlevel bureaucrat Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce), who copes with the monotonous insanity by refusing to move from his comfortable if dull position as a technically gifted drone in the Ministry of Information. Lowry is haunted by fantasy dreams of a beautiful woman endangered, and he is her knight in shining armor. When he sees the woman in real life (Kim Greist), he is drawn further into a bureaucratic nightmare, where typos become death sentences.

Leaving the safety of the ducts is exhilarating for Lowry, but fraught with danger. Even his brief successes in fighting the machine redound on him to his greater peril. An off-the-books repair job culminates in the destruction of his home, replete with broken, steaming ducts. His efforts at his new job (accepted only to find his fantasy woman) to stop an endless stream of message delivered through tubes by fashioning his own makeshift duct has a predictably disastrous result.

Terry Gilliam directs as if building a collage, which, given his beginning as bizzaro animator for Monty Python, is not terribly surprising; the result is a frenetic, sometimes jumbled look that nevertheless coalesces into a despairing but penetrating examination of institutionalized mediocrity, and its danger to the dreamer.