Brazil
Very much an anarchic semi-adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in the same package. Style over substance might be too harsh, but definitively a low cosmopolitrometer setting.
The plot only lasts about a third of the way, then it’s all about running away from one bombastic set piece to another. Gilliam must really hate his mother and/or women in general, a bit of an Oedipus complex going on here. Visually inventive, yes, particularly with so many practical effects.
The trigger for the whole thing is some bored office worker swatting a fly which inadvertently glitches an automated ticker tape kind of machine that produces a mistake in a form of some kind, leading to a cascade of unimaginable proportions, including the deaths of hundreds of people, millions of pounds in busy work, and the fulfilment of many many many forms with inscrutable titles.
The setting is not as much Britain, but an imagined IngSoc pastiche, focused on the Byzantine bureaucratic system underpinning it all. The hero is a aristo (what the English call “middle class”) slumming it on some menial paper pushing job. He’s just coasting though, there’s no real problem to sleeping in. He is mostly an hacker solving problems, but wants no bigger responsibility.
After the Tuttle/Buttle confusion (or is it the other way around?), some department bills around 20 pounds to the wrong account, and this produces a gargantuan amount of grief in terms of system errors. Our protagonist just wants to get out of the office, so he volunteers to solve this problem, by physically visiting the real world.
This requires travelling to the slums underpinning the enormous amount of people in suits, plastic surgery up the wazoo, and overall idleness of the rich. Interacting with the subject of his pencil pushing mistakes produces PTSD on our protagonist, as that led to an innocent man being raided by SWAT members and disappeared.
The neighbour saw the whole abduction and is now a person of interest, after trying to report the error through the proper channels. She’s actually the dream girl for our protagonist, which can only mean one thing: stalking using LOVEINT, pulling his maternal strings to get promoted to the real Gestapo (named Information Retrieval, natch).
Our protagonist does find her, in her all truck driving glory, proposed to her then gets thrown out of the truck, but he won’t take no for an answer (yikes!). He then saves her from some bureaucracy, but she is still pissed at this stranger professing declarations of love for her.
By this point, the plot turns to set pieces only. Our protagonist gets shuffled around, jailed, and tortured in Room 101. The ending was used in Repo Man, or Total Recall, the good ending was just a ruse for the real one: brain washing, trepanation, the works.
There’s a parallel subplot about the protagonist’s apartment. The whole thing filled with gadgets that barely work, requiring enormous amounts of maintenance (fitting for a rich and bored bachelor).
When the HVAC glitches and he calls Central Services as an emergency, his call is routed to a recording, but some rogue hacker intercepts that call, bursts into his house brandishing a gun, and illegally fixes the air conditioning, before rappelling into the void. He summoned the bureaucrats, so they appear after it’s fixed already, and our protagonist hits them with procedural mumbo-jumbo to get them to leave. This only enrages them, so they come back with a vengeance: the form for temporary “eminent domain” allowing them to rip the house apart looking for the illegal fix. They do, then leave the house absolutely knackered.
If there’s a theme to the whole thing us that office work is unimaginable boredom, only fit for absolute wet blankets, ambitious bootlickers, or Morlock hackers routing around the system.
I did wonder why would a millionaire producer would finance a film where the protagonist is a version of Winston Smith that turns to terrorism half way through, then it hit me: it’s Arnon Milchan, know friend of Irgun. Said billionaire is more known for bribing Bibi Netanyahu for allowing him to pay no taxes for a decade. He recently testified in London and Netanyauh’s wife was physically present. Rule of Law, my ass!
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.