40 Years Ago, Brazil Predicted Our Ridiculous Present Day Dystopia

George Orwell got a lot right about the totalitarian future we’d be facing today, but it was Terry Gilliam who predicted just how hopelessly humorous it would all be. The writer and director is best known for the heightened whimsy of movies like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but each of his films, however cartoonish, harbors a jaded core.

Brazil might be his darkest: a zany riff on Orwell’s 1984, it could have stuck to loosely-connected sketches about the pitfalls of a near future. In early drafts, that’s exactly what it was, and it probably would’ve been easier to market. Instead, Brazil is just as serious as it is silly. It hopscotches from one genre into the next with abandon, flirting with tragedy and absurdity as it tells its cautionary tale. Gilliam’s ambitions might not have made sense to everybody when Brazil was released 40 years ago, but today, its warning couldn’t be clearer.

Brazil has never felt timelier than it does now, though to hear Gilliam tell it, he wasn’t trying to predict our current woes. “[Brazil] was about then as far as I was concerned,” he told Deadline this June, “and then is the same as now, just the players changed, basically.”

It may feel like we’re closer than we’ve ever been to Brazil’s hyper-consumerist, morally defunct authoritarian regime, but Gilliam did work to make the film feel timeless. It’s in neither the future nor the past; it could be set in a near-present Chicago or a crumbling European metropolis. It’s brushing up against the towering cityscapes of something like Blade Runner, but office clerks still use pneumatic tubes to transfer paperwork.

This unnamed city is on the cutting edge yet hopelessly inefficient: a fly stuck in a typewriter results in a wrongful arrest and the demise of an innocent citizen. Faulty technology triggers hundreds of random explosions, which the state blames on an organization of faceless criminals. Meanwhile, the people tasked with keeping this society running smoothly would rather dodge their duties and watch old movies on the clock.

Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) is one such slacker. His preferred method of escape is through his dreams, where he imagines himself as a kind of Icarus flying through the sky in a beautiful metal suit, and where a beautiful woman meets him in the clouds. Though he’s one of the best at his job at the Department of Records, Sam doesn’t have much ambition otherwise — until he meets Jill Layton (Kim Greist), a truck driver who bears a striking resemblance to his dream girl.

Jill has even less reverence for the rules, which soon makes her an enemy of the state. Sam’s infatuation with her gets him into plenty of hot water as he abuses his bureaucratic privileges, but Brazil is a lot more than a story of boy meets girl. Through Sam and his (often ridiculous) day-to-day routine, we learn the ins and outs of his dysfunctional society, and even meet the one man with the power to disrupt it. But as Sam’s life unravels, so too does any real hope of resolution.

This society seems too big to fail, and anyone brave enough to challenge its supremacy eventually gets crushed by the machine. It’s an incredibly dour stance, and Gilliam’s nihilistic humor can only undercut so much tragedy. The only silver lining here is that we’re still somewhat removed from a society this dark. Is there still time to reverse course, or will the next 40 years see us pulled even deeper into Brazil’s inescapable orbit?

Brazil is available to rent on YouTube, Apple TV, and Amazon Prime.