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     The consummation of this appallingly capricious director's cut stands alone as something of a miracle in the history of film, a one-of-a-kind testament to the visual genius as well as the cinematic hubris to which an uninhibited imagination can give birth. If you're prone to greet Lynch's best work with a customarily loyal enthusiasm, you may find it gratifying to watch Terry Gilliam's story glide along on the steam of its own whimsy, as a philosophic subtext slowly stems from the roots of the man's creative fancy instead of reigning that fancy in for the sake of "artistic coherence." In the end, regardless of whatever value one can accredit to Gilliam's nightmare vision of bureaucracy (on one level, at least, the trials and tribulations undergone by Jonathan Pryce's Everyman protagonist seem to vaguely parallel the difficulties of getting Brazil's unexpurgated cut released in America), the most rewarding dimension of this motion picture's success is its very freeform implementation of the unknown, the predetermined, and the cinematically superfluous: rarely has a movie so lacking in restraint appeared so confident and assured of its own inventive excess. Also important to note, Gilliam has somehow fabricated one of the few paranoid fever-dreams of the last century that can legitimately rival Orson Welle's The Trial in its glimpse of the psychology of the persecuted. Accordingly, the film's production design would be more aptly likened to Kafka than to Orwell, and if you think long and hard enough about critic Jack Matthew's contention against the existence a single "futuristic" element in the picture, Brazil takes on a new, unexpected identity guaranteed to silence any comparisons to 1984 that could ever come to mind.

Brazil

capsule review by André de Alencar Lyon

Terry Gilliam

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