I got very late to seeing Brazil. 27 years later. It was released in 1985, one year after Orwell’s year, which was also the exact moment I left my own Orwellian universe, the one where I had lived the first 31 years of my life. I was too busy finding my ways in the new world to see good movies then, I had no time and no money, the getting back to the pleasure of seeing movies happened only a few years later. This is how I missed this exuberant anti-utopia, an almost permanent mix of dreams and nightmares, where reality is the longest and darkest nightmare of all. Now I eventually found the time and the opportunity to do it, from the perspective and with the experience of an individual who spend an almost equal period of time in a supposedly free society. I was impressed.
source http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/
The story of the clark in the Kafkaesque bureaucratic system is basically similar to the one in 1984. What is different here is the freedom that director Terry Gilliam took in building his retro-futuristic world, the infinite imagination in building the sets in all their complexity and attention to details. There are many memorable scenes in this film, some impress by the visuals, other by the rhythm of the action, the surprising actions. the relation between the characters that borrows a lot from the classical films of Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel and Hardy in a Metropolis atmosphere. Almost each scene is a masterpiece of sets creation and architecture.
(video source thecultbox)
Jonathan Pryce made here probably the best role of his career, while Bob Hoskins and Robert De Niro (not necessarily in the best role of his life) leave their marks as well. Almost three decades later the future imagined in movies like 1984 and Brazil is closer to our reality than ever. Mind control, interference of the authorities in private lives, permanent supervision, and huge electronic bureaucracies at work in any aspect of life are all realities. Some of the machines that we are using may be more sophisticated or just different than the ones imagined by the directors of those movies, but in many other aspects we are almost there.