Last night I had the pleasure of attending an early showing of Gilliam's 1985 classic BRAZIL, an appropriately Monty Python inspired comedy/drama set in an all too familiar buracratic distopia where secret police burst into your home in the middle of Christmas eve night and dissapear your husband while asking you to sign the receipt in return. Like so many tales before it BRAZIL echos the same critiques of capitalism and conformity that were caught on film in METROPOLIS (1927) and the same themes of militarization shown in THE BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925). There is even an homage to the famous Potemkin scene in which police are marching down the staircase and massacring citizens. Think 1984 or BRAVE NEW WORLD or our own present day reality for that matter mixed with the HUDSUCKER PROXY, captured in the iconic and bizzare Gilliam wide-angle style and you get an amazingly funny and thought provoking film that is appropriately beautiful and horrificly unsettling. And like many of the classics which it resembles it will leave you very satisfied yet disturbed at how not so far from reality this absurd tale really is.
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