BRAZIL @ 40

A fly in an office causes a misprint (Tuttle becomes Buttle) that sends an assault team to an apartment.  The woman in the flat above witnesses the false arrest. Across town, young and unambitious clerk solves the administrative problem by delivering a refund cheque to the arrested man's widow (he was interrogated with extreme prejudice). He catches sight of the woman in the upstairs flat and can't believe that she is the one he has been seeing in his weird heroic dreams. He gives pursuit but she evades him. He has to find her. She has to subvert him. A rom com in dystopia.

Terry Gilliam's 1985 satirical comedy shows him in greater control of his material than he ever had been. That said, the film is a wall to wall show of comic excess. City scapes are endless blocks of light and shadow, gigantic stacks and silos dominate, peaks on uniform caps are huge, the depictions of age-defying plastic surgery are bizarre, and nightmare ducting is stuffed into walls and between floors. The score swings between many versions of the title song and a stern orchestral pallet that most strongly resembles Wagner.

What Gilliam does not have under firm control is encouraging empathy for his central character, Sam. Sam is a staid bureaucrat whose motivations away from his his professionally immobile mediocrity are erotic dreams in which he is a winged superhero who battles giants to save a woman as fantastical as his self-image. When he's not a pen pusher, he's a Wagnerian superman. It is comedy that when he meets the woman in real life and she is not a long haired cloud maiden but a truck driver who might also be a terrorist and that the only weapons he has to "save" her are either clerical or pointlessly reckless. The ungenerically delayed meet cute is a perfectly timed slapstick. Their first kiss is similarly fumbled.

Out in the streets, the scene is a kind of what really might have been answer to Orwell; a capitalist totalitarianism. A little girl is overheard to tell Santa that all she wants for Christmas is a credit card. The Salvation Army band had been rebranded as Consumers for Christ. The women of influence past a certain age are having their features stretched like plasticine or remodelled to death by cosmetic reconstruction. The chief terror figure is a rogue plumber whose life was saved at the beginning by a fly whose mission is to curtail delays in repair calls. When the regime collides with irregularity it eradicates it rather than bends with it toward social harmony. We who have witnessed pubic bodies sold to private interests in the past few decades know this all too well. Dollars over service business means a ready ditching of service and localised cartels, not healthy competition.

If Sam is impossible to empathise with before he, too, is a victim, his counterpart, Jill, we're with from the first. Her anti-authority stance, sassiness and ready action make us wish that we were following her. Then, though, Sam would be a pest rather than a slowly learning saviour. The problem is in the writing, here, rather than the casting. Jonathon Pryce's Sam plays his character as written, showing intelligence above others but repressing it, he is also drab. He's meant to be but when he sees Jill for real his driving pursuit of her feels like unlovable lust rather than liberating desire. Until she gets the opportunity to pushback and deal with the consequences, there is no path to Sam's redemption. Kim Greist's playing a touch higher than the word demanded is the one of the pair who makes the difference.

The rest of the cast is stellar. Robert De Niro relishes playing funny. Michael Palin shows comfort in a serious role. Ian Holm is a kind of human Ash from Alien. Katherine Helmond as Sam's interfering mother plays it deliriously bourgeois beneath walls of prosthetics. There are so many more but Gilliam's show of skill with a large cast is clearly more developed than he demonstrated in Time Bandits or Jabberwocky.

Gilliam had intended to call this, among a few other things, 1984 1/2. This was ruined by Michael Radford's sombre adaptation of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The choice of Brazil, referring to a song of idyllic escape into fantasy, travels far better through time than the Pythonesque joke of the original title. Moreover, that Gilliam built a very different world to Orwell (and Radford's adaptation), suggesting a different choice that led to a very similar outcome. Orwell was concerned with a Britain ruled by totalitarians who had long abandoned their socialist principles. Gilliam examined the effect on a starting point of capitalism to the extent that consumerism was the doctrine. 

An interesting aesthetic choice was not so much the use of technology to oppress the populace but that it was struggling to keep up with the job. Wires stick out, tiny computer screens need large magnifiers to be read and, while there is an online world it is mechanical and past it's shelf date. This is partially done for laughs but the '80s was a time of great technological grandstanding with shrinking computers promising a miniaturised future of boundless public engagement. With the likes of War Games, Brainstorm and Tron delivering cautionary tales that also indulged in the fun possibilities, Brazil's buzzing id. checkers and faulty auto alarm clock systems suggest more the jokes about Soviet technology. The low res dot matrix print-outs depended upon in the film were actually better than in real life is an odd art department anomaly, considering the intent.

The same guy who was suspicious of Radford's film at the time was the same who thought this was another anti-Soviet taunt. When I asked him if there was a depiction of Soviet life he did like he advanced Gorky Park. Nothing from the actual USSR, a Hollywood thriller. Perfectly intelligent bloke but with the film evaluation of an apparatchik. Brazil also came under attack for adopting fascist ideology. This is mostly from Sam's dream sequences which play like Duran Duran videos if they covered The Ring Cycle. Hitler's moviemaker Leni Riefenstahl was evoked more than once by writers who didn't get that the dreams of a functionary clerk might well be epic and ironically on the scale of fascist art. Gilliam adds a real pathos to these passages. You would really have to struggle to find a sincere fascist moment in them.

Terry Gilliam was still wresting his way out of his association with Monty Python and would continue until he stopped using members of the group in his casts. His 1990s are justly celebrated with entries like 12 Monkeys and Fear and Loathing. Unfortunately, the troubles he had with the suits of the business are a plague to this day and he still struggles to get projects off the ground and then to release in cinemas. The only good thing about that is that, when he does, at the end of adversity, he brings a full vision to the world, it's massive and enjoyable. For all of Brazil's infrequent heights, its awkwardness and missteps, it is one of those exceptions. That it has had such a profound effect on the look and feel of so much of the imaginative cinema that followed it eases its imperfections smooth. It's still funny. It's still profound. It still works.

Viewing Notes: I watched the HD presentation on Disney +. This is the longer cut, approved by Gilliam and even though it's only ten minutes longer, it does drag. Unfortunately, the only way to see the original cinema release is to get an overseas release which includes it among the other cuts (happy to be wrong about this).

Review: NOSFERATU: 2025 begins

Young newlywed Ellen is racked by nightmares. While on one of her somnambulistic strolls she is attacked by a monstrous figure. But was this a dream or a memory?? She seems to be in psychic contact with a dark force. Her husband, upwardly mobile lawyer, is sent on a job to ride over from Germany to Transylvania to get a frail old client to sign the deeds to the local ruin. He starts on horseback, because it's still the nineteenth century there, and sees some ghastly stuff before, on a moonlit road he is met by a driverless black carriage which takes him to Castle Orlok where he meets the decrepit Count Orlok and - 

Wait a minute, wait a minute, isn't this just Dracula? Yes it is: when F.W. Murnau his Nosferatu he was prevented by Bram Stoker's estate from using the names and a lot of the details of Stoker's novel Dracula. The pursuit of this case all but outlawed the film and most extant copies were destroyed, leaving a kind of Van Allen belt of prints in various states of completion. This is why we have archiving standards but also, had it not been for the incomplete state of investigation that allowed some of the prints to escape the fires, we would be lucky to have production stills today. Murnau's Nostferatu is a marvel of cinema that can still teach us much (and it's still scary).

The thing about all of that, though, is that it formed a very different aesthetic to the depiction of the vampire in film. The later Universal Studios Dracula offered the high style of Bela Lugosi who innntonnnned hees liiiiiiiiines in a parteeeecular manner from the comfort of a tux. Stoker's Dracula, at least the first you see of him, is a flick away from dust. Murnau made him someone whose moral void and centuries of longevity had grown distorted beyond recognition as a former human. His white dome head, bug eyes and rat like teeth put him irretrievably outside the world of people. His approach, helped by some expert editing, is unnerving. Bela's later take added a façade of aristocracy and intensity which earns him a big star on the timeline. When Werner Herzog made his vampire movie in the late '70s he harked back to Murnau rather than Dracula, wanting to return to what Murnau had seen when he thought of the monster. Scrape away the eroticism of Stoker's figure (well, enough of it to make what was left troubling) and tone down the over-egged recipes of the previous two decades. I'll recommend his Nosferatu, here, as well.

So, why do it again? Enter Robert Eggers, indy hero whose TheWitch and The Lighthouse endeared him to all who either live in or can see the margins from their backyards. He is a young filmmaker with a solid output and a strong aesthetic forward look and feel to his works. His movies are the type that while you might not instantly pick as you would a Lynch or Fellini joint it would never surprise you to learn that this scene or still was from one of his. Eggers works truest when he establishes a world and then lets things happen in it. At no time is he non or anti-narrative but he will sooner offer depth of character or outburst of bizarreness to take things a little further out (everything with a mermaid in The Lighthouse). You don't know what you're going to get with one of his but you can rest assured he wants you to remember it.

I won't add more plot here as it's an overfamiliar pattern: threat, race against time, confrontation, end. But how's Eggers world? Happy to report that it is as rich as largely desaturated 35 mm film can look without falling into monochrome. Nothing looks campily olde cinema-e the way Coppola's Dracula did but there is a nod to the claustrophobic look of Murnau's original (might as well point out what looks like a 1.66:1 aspect ratio, as well). I am not a sentimentalist when it comes to the look of celluloid vs digital. Cinematographers have had twenty years to get digital right and they really have. It is nice to see scenes with visible grain (I can remember when 35 mm was the norm and noticing grain in the image and considering it an acceptable flaw). 

It's the performances that really start me asking about the point, though. There's a variation of approaches that cannot mesh without trouble. Willem Defoe's vampire hunter swings from naturalism to histrionics within a line. Nicholas Hoult is phoning it in. Aaron Taylor Johnson is enjoying showing real range. Bill Skarsgard, under Elephant Man levels of prsothetics, is limited to the four-balled bass rasp he spent months developing with an opera singer (but it is really impressive!). Then there's Lily- Rose Depp. Severely corsetted with Victorian tugged back hair, she throws herself into the tormented Ellen as though physically possessed. Shaking, falling into icky spasms, using a wide ranging voice and gymnastic physicality. This is not overacting, it is performative commitment beyond the call of most actors' capability. It is so specialised that it would be hard to consider another turn like it out of this context. When she is face to face with Orlok in scenes that blur sex and animalistic violence, it is unsettlingly difficult to distinguish pleasure from terror.

If there's any general fault I see in this film is that it doesn't quite throw its hand behind being a more fluid telling of the Murnau and Herzog versions. It only occasionally has the courage to depict the supernatural as realism (e.g. the brilliant use of shadow and curtains with the Orlok's silhouette) or as a more firmly drawn romantic work. This prevents tension so that, while there are effective horror moments throughout, the film only edges at horror, never breaking into it.

So, why remake a horror classic that, for all its crunchy condition, is still scary? Well, Herzog wanted to look at its social aspects, the plague-bearing vampire as a force for change. Eggers adds some extra work on the rat plague that Murnau introduced. His re-jig of Orlok's look is out of middle-European folklore, studied and unlike either of the other two films. Is that enough? I don't know. I do know that it feels like there's so much atmospheric glue to wade through to get to the next narrative point while being aware that this one is not meant to be all about the story. Perhaps, it's just operator error: I've seen the other two and countless vampire films that each one that might pop up has so much riding on it that it can't just be a well-made addition, it has to be a wonder. Nosferatu (2024) is not a wonder, it is an achingly beautiful container for a performance that borders on magic. You could do worse. I just wish Eggers had done better.

NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR @ 40

The clocks have just struck thirteen in London, the capital of Airstrip One and aging Winston Smith outer party operative is grinding through another day at work. It's not all bad, though, as he exchanged a look with that nice inner party O'Brien man and you can never underrate that. Then again, it balanced out with a poisonous glance from that young anti-sex horror who is probably thought police. It's the mid-eighties and what used to be Britain has become a nightmare of oppression under a totalitarian regime waging eternal warfare with Eurasia ... or is it Eastasia? Whatever, if it were just the paranoia, made worse by the two way tele screens in every room that, unlike everything else, never seem to break down, he might have a chance at getting through a day without almost collapsing.

Michael Radford's adaptation for the cinema was produced and released in the year itself. He presents a London of Orwell's imagination that looks like the 40s if they'd never been repaired. Apart from inner party dwellings and the ministry buildings, the city is dirty and in constant slow decay. When the sense of self-fulfilling power is clarified, it is evident that none of this will improve. That which stands to fall shall fall and the Party will maintain. An anaemic colour pallet and dour score (more on that later) make the claustrophobic daily life we see feel interminable. Winston frequents old shops in the prole quarter, buying things from a past he wasn't part of like an unused plain paper bound diary. He knows this itself could doom him but considers his life past the point of struggle. The liaison with Julia (not counting that as a spoiler when it's an earl plot point) is similarly flavoured with the nostalgia of the long dead.

John Hurt as Winston was already progressing to a status as a craggy master of his art, always bringing (even to Caligula in I Claudius) a puzzled sadness to his characters who, even at the top of their game knew at moments the great ruling futility of sentient life. Suzanna Hamilton, on the other hand brings a fire to Julia. She makes her blue-grey boiler suit sexy, especially when showing how much restraint she needs to keep herself from napalming everyone around her. She shows intelligence and cheek behind an expression calculated to look party-first. And then there's Richard Burton as the inner party O'Brien who brings a quiet control to the oppressor in chief. It is his voice that, after decades of alcohol and more recently developing illness, delivers the line: "If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever." It's almost a whisper but there is such solid bass below it that the strength of the sound alone would kill the fight in the strongest of us. Hurt's agonised, degraded Winston on the torture table can only respond in whimpers. If you only heard the audio of these scenes, you wouldn't sleep for days.

George Orwell's nightmare scenario became a synonym for governmental smothering and as the year approached, media pundits played spot the overtone, using terms like newspeak to augur democracy's close of play. Orwell tells the story from the perspective of the lowest of the middle stratum who can observe the elite inner party as well as the self-defeating consumers of the proletariat. By day he alters public memory when a citizen becomes an unperson or an economic prediction falls short, changing media reports in news archives. Sometimes he creates war heroes to cover public disgraces. In case you thought that all you had to do was get better at your job there in the Ministry of Truth, consider Winston's colleague Syme whose fevered enthusiasm for shrinking the English language in the Newspeak Dictionary is only singling him out for erasure. Don't slack off. Don't be too eager.

Radford's script wisely avoids the clumsier of Orwell's imagined future. Anyone who composes a story for the future will invent terms that sound too contrived to ever be uttered by people. Partially, this is intentional alienation, to press the point of a future setting. While the scarier terms like Artsem (artificial insemination) and  Ingsoc (English socialism) make it through, awkward formations like rocket bombs or telescreens don't. All terms get shortened with use (fridge, bike, TV) with very few exceptions. Radford just leaves them out as their function is already clear.

If you haven't read Orwell's novel, I'd recommend it. Not only is it an effortless task, however severe its events, it is one of the most articulately formed and interwoven warnings against totalitarianism ever written. This film is not the only one made of it but, of those I've seen, I prefer it. The intention was source fealty and, within reason, that happened. 

Oh, I need to interrupt for a second. This film was largely funded by Virgin a corporate entity that commissioned a electropop score from duo The Eurythmics. While it's serviceable, it does none of the harder work that Dominic Muldowney's already finished music does. I clearly recall the song Sexcrime being played between the last cinema ad and the start of the film and friend Sarah's look of crushed embarrassment. It sounds like a Eurythmics song but in that context also sounds like someone trying way too hard. The Muldowney score is generally the one you'll hear if you see this film but for a while there, the broadcast version had the other one, as though a few bars of contemporary pop would lift, um, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The story is claimed by each end of politics as a warning against the other. Yes, the original intent of the movement that began Ingsoc is along Marxist lines but the criticism of Marxism through this is shallow and point-missing. No one getting the hell beaten out of them by political prison staff takes a moment to think, "well, at least they're lefties". The funniest response to this film that I heard at the time was of a student council pollie who joked that the only thing he liked about it was that the good guys win. 

Anyway, by the point of the setting, whatever principles drove the initial motion have long been abandoned and hold no visionaries nor thinkers. O'Brien is a ruler of reality. He and his inner party are doing what they must because they are able. There is no point beyond retaining power over a confused population. If that isn't a lesson that this bastard of a year needs I don't know what can be.

Then again, we live at a time when a film like Civil War can get ridiculed for suggesting an alliance between California and Texas without anyone stopping to consider that the point might be that conditions had become so dire that these two odd bedfellows would need each other. O'Brien's tests of Winston's compliance, demanding that his responses be genuine, just kept reminding me that the approach of the past decade where the phrase fill the zone with shit can win elections. Freedom is slavery. War is Peace. Ignorance is bliss. Orwell's tale is a powerful one but I wonder if, now, it might not just feel more like a celebration. The good guys win, they just aren't who you thought they were. Well, that's what they're telling you.