Brazil

REVIEW
The second in Gilliam's "trilogy" about the realm of fantasy intruding into everyday life (the first being Time Bandits, the last The Adventures of Baron Munchausen), this darkly comic film is the best of the three. Pryce is a bureaucrat stuck in a chaotic government styled in equal parts after 1984 and Modern Times. He accidentally discovers a mistake made by an authoritarian wing of the government where a man was tortured to death because of a clerical error. His struggle with both his conscience and with the authorities who are now after him is interwoven with his increasingly frequent flights of fancy involving a mysterious stranger he loves and a huge samurai-like demon he must defeat to save her. Gilliam's vision is perfectly realized here; his futuristic society is a black, towering megalith of ductwork, fascist architecture and machinery crammed into every possible space. A towering achievement for Gilliam, especially considering the struggle he reportedly had to have the film released in its original form -- a struggle with a mindless bureaucracy not unlike the one experienced by Pryce in this work of "fiction."