Stretching reality into whatever shape is needed.
My Arts Editor insisted I watch Brazil (1985), and, besides the fact that I can’t imagine why it’s entitled Brazil, I have to say it was a fascinating look into how and whether the human mind can compartmentalize its way to sanity, as we watch terrorist attacks ignored, as best they can, by diners in restaurants and cleanup crews in government ministry buildings; men who work in government offices sharing desks through the office wall, and fighting over it, in offices a mouse might find small; and even, in the end, during the death by torture of a man who manages to soar off into a beautiful future in his mind, as even his own life is coming to an end.
If only the latter had happened, then I might have written it off as a mind descending into madness to evade the unacceptable, but as we watch the above as well as entire offices that watch old video dramas such as Casablanca when the boss isn’t watching them, and then madly working when he appears, or consider the behavior of workers who, when confronted with the mere mention of a required government form in order to enter a residence to perform repairs, retreat in terror, there comes a frisson of wonder about our own concern over rules and regulations, which run through this film much like the duct-work which impinges continually on the visuals.
The rogue, the person unimpressed with the government forms and the rules they represent, are the flies in the ointment of this bleeding wound on society, labeled terrorists for, perhaps, good reason, as the occasional wall is blown out with explosives. But then again, the Information Retrieval specialists, who operate in the broadest sense of the term, are, in their own way, government-sponsored terrorists, removing those who may add yeast to a bread that seems a trifle flat.
And on this part of the tour we’ll be inspecting a modern dental station!
But this all works, more or less, from the sordid realities of overweening bureaucracy to the hero’s night-time dreams of defeating its embodiment as a Japanese warrior, because it follows its own logic scrupulously, at least so far as I can make out, both internal to the society and how human beings would react to it, from its embrasure to its rejection. In some ways, it predicts those who would reject democracy because it leaves them naked on the beach, hungry and vulnerable. Nothing is sacred in either reality, but those in power will fight to stay in power.
And, in some ways, it’s a tabula rasa on which an observer might draw his or her own lessons about any of a multitude of subjects.
Should you see it? That depends on your tolerance for whimsy and the utter disregard for the plausibility of a social reality portrayed with one’s tongue firmly in one’s cheek. If you have a high threshold and have never seen this classic, then Recommended.
PS and the computers are utterly charming, a paean to the Art Deco movement of a century ago.
