Cast

Jonathan Pryce, Robert de Niro, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm, Bob Hoskins, Michael Palin, Ian Richardson, Peter Vaughan, Kim Greist, Jim Broadbent, Charles McKeown, Bryan Pringle

awards

BAFTA Film Award 1986 – Best Production Design, Best Special Visual Effects; BFI Awards 1986 – Technical Achievement Award; LAFCA Awards 1985 – Best Director, Best Picture, Best Screenplay; BSFC Award 1986 – Best Supporting Actor

Film description

Sam Lowry dreams of being a superhero. Unfortunately, he is an nondescript, pencil-pushing civil servant who must not only deal with boredom but also try to escape the influence of his authoritarian mother, who not only wants to direct his career by arranging his promotions, but is also kept young with ghastly plastic surgeries. Lowry’s life takes a sudden turn when he meets the girl of his dreams – literally: he meets the girl he sees in his recurring dreams. He decides to turn his back on his inert life and fight against the soullessness of the system in which he is a cog. Will he succeed in this unequal fight? Although comparisons with Orwell’s 1984 or Godard’s Alphaville are inevitable, Gilliam shows us his very own vision of totalitarian reality: crippling bureaucratic rules, mutual surveillance among citizens, a network of denunciations and an endless labyrinth of administrative regulations. The story plays out in a dystopia undermined by faulty technology, where people blindly hope for the visions of happiness advertised by colourful posters promising eternal youth and limitless material comforts. The film’s visuals are a gloomy reflection of the modernism of Metropolis and the sterile skyscrapers of Tati’s Play Time – Gilliam presents a vision of a city rotting from the inside, laden with steam-spewing pipes and concrete slums. Brazil melds classic film noir moods with the cyberpunk visions of Blade Runner while insisting on the beauty of individual imagination.