That Moment In – Brazil

This short post is inspired by the incorruptible That Moment In.

When I chose Brazil for June’s Blind Spot I figured I had some sort of an idea of what I was getting into. The crazed, surreal stills available on a simple Google search or IMDB image gallery give off a somewhat disturbed impression and so I didn’t expect anything less from Terry Gilliam.

But what I got was so much more than a few bloated baby masks, stretchy faces and dream sequences. I’ll save the meaty stuff for my upcoming review but there is one particular moment that just has to be shared. For all those that have seen it I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to be taken aback, which in a film that possesses such a surreal vision in its entirety is saying something.

Up until this moment our protagonist Sam Lowry, played by Jonathan Pryce, was purely interested in pursuing the girl of his dreams, quite literally. He’d had a run in with some air conditioning bureaucrats, attempted to console the victim of an admin error and even attended a pompous high class dinner date with his mother, slop and explosions to boot. But all of this was just small fry surrealism that sucked you in until it became the norm and you came to expect nothing less.

This one moment came completely out of the blue and I was laughing well into the following scene, I even rewound and watched it again to make sure I heard what I heard. Despite Gilliam’s visionary genius infused into each and every scene, evidenced by his purposeful and informative mise-en-scene, shot selection and bizarre plot progression, this is the one scene that will always stand out from the rest and a scene that I will be talking about for weeks.