Brazil

The plot itself is tight, and its first cause is a beetle. The insect in the teleprinter turns Tuttle into Buttle, and from that misprint come Buttle’s death, the refund that sends Sam to Jill’s building, Jill’s complaint that makes her a suspect, and the arrest. Tuttle’s duct work brings Spoor and Dowser down on Sam’s flat; Ida’s surgery is paid at Mrs Terrain’s funeral, where she appears with Jill’s face; the flight dreams prepare the escape that the ending reveals. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: much of the long cut is permitted rather than compelled. Several dreams make one point in different costumes, and the restaurant, the department store and the Shangri-La Towers run long in the middle hour, as the shorter American cut shows.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. A state that runs on paper does its violence by procedure: a clerical error kills a man, and the system bills his widow for the interrogation, then refunds the overcharge, with Sam delivering the cheque. Evil here has no face. Jack Lint, the torturer, is a family man and Sam’s friend, in a cardigan, with a child in his office. Beneath it lies a second truth: the comfortable functionary’s only freedom is the private dream, and the dream resists nothing, since Sam’s rescue is what the state’s chair leaves him. The consumer half, Ida’s surgery and diners ignoring a bomb, discloses through image. Held below the top because the terrorism is never explained and the state is caricature more than anatomy.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Elevation comes often and in two registers. The flight dreams, Sam in winged armour above the clouds to Kamen’s swelling “Brazil”, are transport, and the film knows they are kitsch, which adds a second note. Dread is its deeper height: the torture chamber, a vast cylindrical hall with a lone chair, entered by a tiny figure; Lint’s baby mask; Tuttle swallowed by a storm of paper and gone. The last shot, the camera drawing back up the chamber from Sam humming while Helpmann says “He’s got away”, is the film’s summit. What holds the figure is noise rather than height: much of the film is busy, loud and comic, and the elevations are spaced by long passages of frantic farce.

Score: 8.1 / 10

The myth is built and bears the plot. Sam’s winged dream is Icarus made structure: he flies only in sleep, the waking world exists to bring him down, and the samurai he fights wears his own face. Kafka’s pattern is built too, the man summoned by a system whose charge he cannot learn, and Orwell’s, from the Ministry to the room where the friend is the torturer. The film makes figures of its own: Tuttle the plumber as outlaw hero, the duct as the state’s gut, the mother who grows young as her son is consumed, with Jill’s face, an Oedipal knot the funeral shows without a word. The particular stays particular: a cramped desk, a Christmas parcel, a refund cheque. The limit stands: the Kafka and Orwell patterns are inherited and openly cited.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The inheritance is the dystopian tradition, Zamyatin, Huxley, Orwell and Kafka, its films from Metropolis (8.3) to Michael Radford’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), and Gilliam’s own Monty Python. The turn is large: dystopia played as farce, the total state given as clutter, malfunction and bad plumbing rather than efficiency, and a future dressed in 1940s fashions, pneumatic tubes and tiny screens under magnifiers. The stake is the measure. An ending without consolation, at this length, for American studio money, defended in public against the chairman of Universal at real cost to its maker’s career; the studio’s own 94-minute happy ending shows what the swerve refused. Held below the top by precedent: the comic dystopia had Dr. Strangelove (8.7), and Kafka was read as comedy.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Change the form and the film loses its central knowledge. The braid of dream and waking, kept distinct for most of its length, merges in the last half hour: the rescue, the Ministry blown apart and the flight with Jill are filmed in the same register as the waking world, so the viewer takes the dream for the ending, as Sam does. When the camera returns to the chair, the audience has been made to want the escape and is shown what that wanting is. That is form as the instrument of the disclosure. The design knows it too: ducts everywhere, screens too small to see, desks too small to work at, make the state a built environment. Held below the top because much of the middle is a conventional chase, and the earlier dreams are often decoration.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Forty years of return have not exhausted the film, and the evidence is in the record. Its readings are several and live: political satire of bureaucracy; a film about the artist’s escape into fantasy and its cost; a reading of its own production history, the studio’s happy ending as the Ministry’s; a film about consumer comfort and indifference to violence. The design rewards return in detail, in posters, signage, the ducts in every room and the infinite paper. Criticism has kept returning, from Jack Mathews’s The Battle of Brazil to the Criterion edition that set its three versions side by side, which made the film an object of study in authorship. Held at the figure because much of the yield is visual invention, and the central argument is grasped whole on a first viewing.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Released in 1985, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of its decade. Intrinsic force: the film showed that a dystopia could be built from obsolescence and comedy rather than a gleaming future, gave a design language of ducts, retro machines and paper that became a visual idiom, and made an ending that refuses rescue the meaning of a fantasy film. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Jeunet and Caro’s Delicatessen (1991) and The City of Lost Children (1995), the Coens’ The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) and Proyas’s Dark City (1998) are commonly placed in its line, and its release became the standing case of director against studio. Held a tenth below the gate: its reach is a strand in its decade, not a redirection as Blade Runner (8.6) was.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across forty-one years. Form: the film survives whole in both of Gilliam’s cuts, and the 142-minute cut is the standard version on home editions. The studio’s 94-minute re-edit exists and replaced the film for some television audiences, but it never displaced the release and now circulates as a document of the dispute; the charge for it is small. Presence is continuous: repertory, home video, a Criterion edition, teaching and lists of the best British films, though as a cult more than at the widest. Fabric: the surface is deliberately anachronistic, a future made from the past, and it ages as design rather than as fashion. The model effects of the dreams show their date, a small charge.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The making carries the form in design and image. Norman Garwood’s sets build a whole world; Roger Pratt’s wide-angle lenses and canted frames make every interior oppress; Michael Kamen’s score turns one song into a lament, a march and a cartoon. Jonathan Pryce carries the film in nearly every scene, and Michael Palin’s Lint is the finest performance in it, warmth and menace in one voice. The charges are real and fall in central places. Kim Greist’s Jill is thin, and the love that drives the plot has little to hold it; the middle hour’s pacing slackens into noise; the cutting of the action scenes is loose; the dream effects are uneven. Command of a very high order in some departments, not continuous.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the slapstick, Sam’s desk dragged through the wall by the man next door, Spoor and Dowser buried in their own sewage, and the torture chamber. They obey one law: the state is a machine of absurd procedure, and absurdity is how it kills. Lint’s baby mask is where the two meet, comic and appalling at once. Dream and waking obey one law too, since every dream image is a transform of something Sam has seen: the ducts, Jill’s truck, his mother. The range is wide and held. What gives is the tonal scatter of the middle hour, where the farce runs on its own energy and the danger lapses, and the restaurant and department store, whose satire of consumer life seems drawn from a broader film.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Many orders are held in one structure: the state and its law; labour, in the clerk’s office and the plumber’s trade; the family, in a son and a mother who becomes his lover’s face; love; the inner life of dream; consumer society; terror and the city. They are integrated through one man and one error, and the error runs through every order in turn, from the Buttles’ flat to the chamber. What is missing is named. The natural order is seen only as a fantasy of cloud and countryside; history is abolished by design, the film set somewhere in the twentieth century; the sacred appears only as Christmas, as commerce; the terrorists, who might have brought politics in as a force, stay a rumour. The form’s limit, one consciousness, is respected rather than overcome.

Score: 8.1 / 10