Brazil

The British tradition mined here is not so much sci-fi as Ealing comedy, Jonathan Pryce's resemblance to Alec Guinness posits a visionary explosion of The Man in the White Suit. The squashed bug in the machine is the first of many invocations of Kafka, it sets in motion the metamorphosis of the meek wonk from bureaucrat to fugitive. "A bit of a stickler for paperwork," he's content with anonymity at the office but soars like Fellini's Guido in dreams of sprouting skyscrapers and clanging samurai. The oneiric damsel turns out to be a spiky trucker (Kim Greist), too busy protesting the cruel system to be anybody's muse. The future is the past, cf. Alphaville, outdated monitors and fedoras dot the gargantuan rubble of Rube Goldberg gizmos and intestinal ducts, a concrete grid not quite warmed by Christmas decorations. Terry Gilliam's wide-angle dystopia, "nice effect, but highly unstable." Malevolent slapstick gets to the bottom of totalitarian horror, the stream of legalese that engulfs the prisoner like a burlap straitjacket and the tasteful scrim that veils the bloody aftermath of a terrorist bomb in an opulent restaurant. Marvelous doodles inhabit the red-tape megalopolis: Ian Holm's officious alarm at the possibility of a mistaken file, Katherine Helmond's deft dottiness while her visage gets stretched under surgical saran, Michael Palin's terrible affability between torture sessions, Bob Hoskins' demonic pettiness with wrench in hand. (As the rogue repairman, Robert De Niro revels with cigar and grin in his hearty "freelance subversive.") The mind as defense against a corporate world, a visualization of Orwell but also of the state of cinema in the middle of the Eighties, an inescapable bleakness to go with the joyousness of Gilliam's inventions. "Can't make a move without a form." The coda all but quotes Borges' "The Wall and the Books" on executioners and flight. Cinematography by Roger Pratt. With Peter Vaughan, Ian Richardson, Sheila Reid, Jim Broadbent, Barbara Hicks, Kathryn Pogson, Charles McKeown, Bryan Pringle, and Derrick O'Connor.