Brazil was directed by Terry Gilliam and written by Gilliam, Charles McKeown, and Tom Stoppard. the film follows the exploits of Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce), a low-level government employee who has frequent daydreams of saving a damsel in distress. One day he Sam is assigned the task of trying to rectify an error caused by a fly getting jammed in a printer, misprinting a file it was copying, resulting in the incarceration and accidental death during interrogation of cobbler, Archibald Buttle, instead of the suspected terrorist, freelance heating engineer Archibald “Harry” Tuttle (Robert De Niro).
Sam begins his mission by paying Buttle’s widow a visit where he discovers Jill Layton (Kim Greist), the upstairs neighbour of the Buttles, and is astonished to see that she has the face of the damsel he saves in his dreams! Jill is trying to help Mrs. Buttle find out what happened to her husband, but has become sick of dealing with the bureaucracy. Unbeknownst to her, she is now considered a loose end and a terrorist accomplice of Tuttle for attempting to report the mistake of Buttle’s arrest in Tuttle’s place. The authorities want her permanently silenced!
When Sam tries to approach her, she is very cautious and avoids giving Sam full details, worried the government will track her down. During this time, Sam comes in contact with the real Tuttle (De Niro), a renegade air conditioning specialist who once worked for Central Services but left due to his dislike of the tedious and repetitive paperwork. Tuttle helps Sam deal with two Central Services workers, Spoor (Bob Hoskins) and Dowser (Derrick O’Connor), who later return to demolish Sam’s ducts and seize his apartment under the guise of fixing the air conditioning. Sam discovers that the only way to learn about Jill is to get transferred to Information Retrieval, where he would have access to her classified records…
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