Cinema: Happy Ending for a Nightmare Brazil

It started with a dead bug. The squashed insect dropped into a typewriter at the Ministry of Information Retrieval; a bureaucrat typed the name Tuttle instead of Buttle; and poor apolitical Mr. Buttle, instead of the swashbuckling terrorist Tuttle, was taken away to be tortured and killed. Dear me, mistakes like this will happen in the Anglo-fascist fantasy world of Brazil. Imagine that Nazi Germany had colonized Britain after winning World War II, and you can visualize the film's architecture: mammoth and soulless, with huge intestinal piping that snakes through every elegant living room and posh restaurant. Imagine that the amiable English temperament was forced to accommodate itself to totalitarianism, and you can anticipate the courtesy with which the riot squad goons knock our hero, Sam Lowry, unconscious ("Sorry, sir, regulations"). Slogans of the police state are everywhere: DON'T SUSPECT A FRIEND--REPORT HIM. And scrawled on a tenement wall is the most obscene graffito of all: REALITY.

There is not a more daft, more original or haunting vision to be seen on American movie screens this year. But until last week there was considerable doubt as to when, if ever, Brazil would find its way into a U.S. movie house. For months the film had been held hostage in the continuing guerrilla war between movie artists and the industry that bankrolls their dreams. In Hollywood, such skirmishes are usually waged behind paneled doors and result in compromises, ulcers and the final sullen handshake. But Director Terry Gilliam is no gentleman warrior. Finding his picture in distribution limbo after Universal Pictures refused to release his film (which he had shot according to the approved script and delivered on budget), Gilliam went public with a full-page plea in Daily Variety to the president of Universal's parent company, MCA: "Dear Sid Sheinberg: When are you going to release my film, Brazil?"

Now Gilliam has his answer. The film that had been declared "unreleasable" won prizes for best film, director and screenplay from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. This week Universal is playing it in Los Angeles and New York to qualify for Oscar consideration. It opens in ten cities next February.

Gilliam has called Brazil "Walter Mitty meets Franz Kafka" and describes its unique, post-Orwellian setting as "somewhere on the Los Angeles-Belfast border." The film's hero, Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce), shambles efficiently through his job at the Ministry of Information records department but lives for his dreams, in which he is girded like Lochinvar, aloft like Icarus, fighting to save a fair heroine from giant samurai and evil, baby-faced thugs. One day he meets Jill Layton (Kim Griest), a truck driver who lived in the flat above the late Mr. Buttle's and looks exactly like Sam's dream girl. To be near her he accepts promotions in the bureaucracy and learns firsthand $ of its comprehensive brutality. By the end he has been betrayed by a very modern Mengele of a surgeon (Michael Palin), rescued by the revolutionary Tuttle (Robert De Niro)--but, alas, it is just another dream, Sam's last one --and lobotomized with nothing in his mind but the old Ary Barroso tune Brazil.