The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

Brazil
51
social criticism invested in each one of the gags. It’s incredibly valid: technology
that’s not working, the Big Brother corporate mentality, big business,
personal vanity—I could go on and on. I don’t think there’s a scene that’s not
examined in some way.
I think the moment that got me was when Lowry was running through
the shopping promenade, and Robert De Niro’s character is suddenly overcome
with hundreds and hundreds of sheets of paper blowing in the wind,
and they start affixing themselves to his body. He’s just standing, and there’s
nothing but paper blowing in the wind in every direction. That’s when the
film got me, and I finally understood what it was about. The whole film was
about that scene. On one level, it was about how the system—bureaucracy
or capitalism or whatever you want to call it, whether you want to get into a
Marxist critique on modern life—how our means and methods of production
and the Ministry of Information retrieval, how all these institutions
can ultimately suffocate our humanity. And that’s exactly what happened to
Robert De Niro’s character in that scene. He ceased to exist, and there was
nothing left but a bunch of paper. It was just a profound image and, to me,
one of the more emotional images in the film. With the terrorist bombings
and the plastic surgery gone bad, we are living in Brazil right now. We get
closer to Brazil with each passing week.
How did you interpret the title?
Kelly: There was a question mark lingering over the film, perhaps because
of the title. You think of Brazil and you think of the country Brazil, which
has nothing to do with what the film is about. I think it was ultimately
named after the lines of the song because the song captured a tone or an
ironic longing. Putting the song against such outlandish yet funny nightmarish
images captured the sense of irony that the film has.
Gilliam first toyed with calling the film The Ministry or, more popularly,
1984½, which was a tip both to George Orwell and to Federico
Fellini for 8½. One critic called it “1984 with laughs,” but Gilliam’s
totalitarian society is one that is absent of Big Brother. The system
itself is the antagonist; there’s no physical villain. How does that
change the viewing experience?