Brazil: The Dystopia That Laughs

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Most film dystopias want you to be afraid. Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, from 1985, wants you to laugh until you notice you have stopped, and by then the trap has closed. It is the funniest totalitarian nightmare ever committed to film, a world of clanking ductwork and misfiled paperwork and cosmetic surgery gone septic, and its comedy is precisely what makes it unbearable. A grim dystopia lets you keep your distance by scaring you. A ridiculous one pulls you in giggling and then reveals that the joke is a machine for grinding people to nothing, and that you have been enjoying it.

12 Monkeys: Gilliam's Time-Loop of Despair

Thu, 11 Jul 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Terry Gilliam is not a director you associate with control. His films tend to burst their seams, run long, over-design every corner of the frame and dare the studio to rein them in. 12 Monkeys, from 1995, is the strange exception, the one time his baroque instincts served a structure so tight it functions like a trap snapping shut. That discipline came from an unusual source: the screenplay by David and Janet Peoples took its bones from Chris Marker’s 1962 La Jetée, a twenty-eight-minute French film told almost entirely in still photographs, about a man haunted by an image of a death he witnessed as a child. Marker’s short is one of the purest time-travel stories ever made, and Gilliam’s achievement is to inflate it to feature length without puncturing it.

Terry Gilliam - vo.rs

Brazil: The Dystopia That Laughs

12 Monkeys: Gilliam's Time-Loop of Despair