A Trip to Terry Gilliam's Brazil
For sale: a lovely piece of dystopian satire conveniently located on the Los Angeles/Belfast border

“I assure you, Mrs. Buttle, the Ministry is very scrupulous about following up and eradicating any error. If you have any complaints which you'd like to make, I'd be more than happy to send you the appropriate forms.”
— Sam Lowry; Brazil (1985)
THE COMPANION had to work one evening last week, granting me carte blanche to choose a film (made jointly, such decisions are typically fraught with intense horse trading and Machiavellian strategic manoeuvering.)
Naturally, I reached straight for Terry Gilliam’s 1985 surrealist dystopian sci-fi Brazil.
The film, which follows a low-ranking bureaucrat's attempts to rectify a fatal clerical error, is beloved in cinephile circles as “one of the great films of the 1980s” (if Criterion says it, it must be true) and is the progeny of the great Terry Gilliam, of Monty Python fame.
So, time to share some rough cuts…
Full Frame: The Review
The film’s setting, a retro-futurist totalitarian state located, according to Gilliam, “on the Los Angeles/Belfast border,” is marvellously realised: an Orwellian nightmare of faceless government departments, Kafkaesque bureaucracy, and deliciously ominous slogans like “Loose talk is noose talk” and “Suspicion breeds confidence.” Brutalist, monolithic offices are punctuated by opulent restaurants, bright, saccharine dream sequences, and, memorably, a cavernous gutlike chamber housing the sinister ‘Ministry of Information Retrieval’ (bonus points if you can guess what that means).
Plus, pneumatic tubes. Lots of pneumatic tubes:1
In the background is the grim reality of the massive housing tower. Sam's Messerschmidt is just puling up in the shadow of the building which is grey, decrepid, vandalised. Huge conduits, pipes, and tubing frame the scene.
All the occupants stick their heads into the corridor, all gazing with Sam at the variously coloured blizzard of paper which has errupted through the whole length of the corridor ceiling, from which protrudes the intestines of the pneumatic system.
The room is bare except for a chair and a desk which is also bisected by the new wall. Pneumatic tubes hang from the ceiling. Sam slowly enters the room.
(*Public service announcement*: I feel compelled to inform you that, when researching this piece, I stumbled across the German pneumatic tube provider ‘Air-Log’, whose website features, in one of my favourite ever internet discoveries, the superbly named article Pneumatic Tube Systems in Movies.)
Brazil is regularly, and darkly, funny, mining much humour from the chasmic gulf between the violence on the screen and the apathetic bureaucratic systems behind it (there are hints of The Coen Brothers in the apparent meaninglessness of it all). There is also a great running gag about the functional disintegration of the supposedly futuristic machines running society (an amusing early scene features the disastrous failure of a Wallace & Gromit-style breakfast-making machine).
As others have noted, Pryce's lead, Lowry, delivers the film’s most telling line: “it’s not my department.” In Brazil’s labyrinthine administrative state, responsibility is dispersed, diffused, diminished. There’s no Evil Overlord at the centre of the web; instead just a gaping hole brimming with legions of petty busybodies. It’s not so much a send-up of any particular ideology as it is the very idea of systemised power, spending as much time skewering the facile allure of Western consumerism as it does the iron fist of totalitarianism.
Pryce’s Lowry is a man lacking gumption: a feeble, insipid spectre whose face vacillates between startled confusion and a sort of catatonic, childlike smile. This becomes tiresome, and the welcome introduction of characters with a bit more pizzaz, such as Robert De Niro’s parodically cool, paperwork-loathing heating engineer-cum-terrorist Tuttle and Katherine Helmond’s grotesquely vain socialite Mrs. Ida Lowry, are too fleeting.
“Sam! Can't you do something about these terrorists?”
“It's my lunch hour. Besides, it's not my department.”
The intention is clear: have Pryce as the bland government man and then add the spice by forcing him into increasingly absurd interactions with a series of more vibrant characters. This contrast, however, begins to grate, and I found myself slipping into apathy just as the stakes for Lowry became most severe.
Despite these pacing issues, Brazil continues to stand out as an exceptionally imaginative and singular work of cinema, sucking you, pneumatic tube style, into its absurd bureaucratic world and spitting you out dazed, amused, and perhaps a little wiser about the perils of arbitrary power.
In Focus: Department of Records Tracking Shot
🔊 *spoiler klaxon* for the opening scenes of the film
Our story opens in urban squalor, where a suited and booted squadron of government goons abruptly disrupts a seemingly ordinary family’s Christmas Eve celebrations.
The father, the hapless Mr. Buttle, is promptly straitjacketed and whisked away, but not before a government man in a rather sinister black trenchcoat hands the horrified Mrs. Buttle a receipt, along with its duplicate:
“This is your receipt for your husband. And this is my receipt for your husband.”
Overwhelmed, Mrs. Buttle collapses, her receipt fluttering to the ground.
The camera closes in on the receipt. A Latin-tinged melody begins to pulse in the background. We cut to an identical receipt, now in a new setting. More layers of Latin instrumentation. A stamp enters the frame, imprinting the ticket with “Department of Records.” The camera pans.
What follows is a bravura tracking shot through the Department of Records.
It’s a glorious piece of visual storytelling: in 70 dialogue-free seconds, we learn everything we need to know about the Department's chaotic, arbitrary, paper-pushing nature:
Notice that, despite there being seemingly dozens of busy workers, no one really does anything; everyone is just running around picking up and putting down different pieces of paper. Equally striking is the workers’ clothing: most people are dressed the same! Clearly, the monotony of government leaves no room for stylistic flair (although I do want to get myself one of those wool sweater vests).
As well as being the face of a red-tape state on steroids, the sheer volume of paper also carries a sinister implication: we’ve just seen, in poor Mr. Buttle, what each piece of paper represents. Gilliam makes this point in his director’s commentary:
“I just loved the idea of very quickly going from the anguish of this woman to it all being tidied up on a receipt but then showing as quickly as possible just the number of people involved in dealing with these receipts and clearly these things are happening all over the world to hundreds and hundreds of people that are all being processed through this system.”
The arbitrariness of it all is compounded by a final visual gag: when Ian Holm’s middle manager Mr. Kurtzman retreats to his study, the pretense of work collapses. Everyone immediately starts watching old Westerns on their tiny screens.
The music adds to the chaos (warning - it’s incredibly catchy), and even contains a little gag of its own, building to a horn-filled crescendo at the 27 second mark just as the camera reveals… more of the same.
The Stinger: Michael Kamen’s Score
Do you think you recognise the music in the Department of Records clip?
I think I know why.
An original composition by Michael Kamen for the film’s soundtrack, the 80 second song has since taken on a life of its own.
Maybe you heard it on the Wall-E trailer. Or the Being John Malkovich trailer. Or the Bee Movie trailer. Or the Mr. Peabody & Sherman trailer. Or the Sicko trailer.
Haven’t seen any of those trailers? Maybe you heard it on a Mazda 3 advert. Or a Cadbury Dairy Milk advert. Or, apparently, a Visa credit card advert.
Point is, it’s an earworm. Vulture even wrote an article about it.
The irony of the song being rinsed and repeated to advertise a series of consumer and commercial products is not lost. The Ministry of Information would be proud.
Extracts from Brazil’s script (emphasis added):