One of my favourite films is Brazil. The premise is basically, “what if orwell’s 1984 were a comedy?”
in Brazil, Robert Deniro plays a vigilante repairman, swinging heroically from apartment to apartment doing unauthorised repairs of broken air conditioning systems. He is the state’s most wanted outlaw, in the film, even more sought than actual terrorists.
I don't think there are actual terrorists in Brazil. All their crap is breaking down, and terrorists are a convenient scapegoat that government there I'm sure internally thinks exist. A sort of systemic hallucination.
It never occurred to me the explosions were due to poorly maintained systems, but that seems like a common interpretation, when I searched around it.
It doesn't quite make sense to me though. If you take the explosions literally, ventilation systems don't tend to do that sort of thing, and if/when they do fail, it tends to be by suffocating everyone with freeon or carbon monoxide, not with explosive fireballs. Boilers can explode, but those are usually in basements, not at the floor level of a restaurant. Restaurant kitchens can and do regularly catch fire, as a result of failing to clean the grease out of cooktop exhaust filters. But again, this usually isn't an explosion.
I suppose the explosions could be a kind of visual metaphor, for the way a small clerical error snowballed into a rolling deadly disaster due to the inhumane and inflexible nature of the bureaucracy.
I'll have to watch the film again to see where all the explosions are- but while I think the explosions are evocative of societal failures, I'm not convinced they're purely metaphorical, or purely meant to be mechanical failures. The film was made in the historical context of the IRA bombing places in real life regularly, and the film would have been stupid to imply, in effect, that the IRA's bombings were government fiction.
Edit: Just had another quick search around and it seems possible that the restaurant explosion scene, character reaction to it, and news rhetoric depicted around terrorism in general could have been inspired by this contemporary event (notably, Thatcher, like the characters in the film, attempted to carry on with the conference as if nothing had happened):
> [Boilers] are usually in basements, not at the floor level of a restaurant.
Are you sure it's like that in Brazil or are you just assuming from where boilers typically are in your location? I for one have never seen a basement in my life, and have never seen a boiler anywhere else but at the floor level.
Brilliant, hilarious, disturbing movie. You probably know this already, but Brazil has two versions, with radically different endings. They lend themselves to diametrically opposed interpretations of the film as a whole. I prefer the director Gilliam's cut, but also appreciate on some meta level how the juxtaposition of both the original and alternate endings -- and the real-life drama around their editing and release -- serves as a self-referential commentary on the film's themes of social critique / satire and the struggle of the individual in the face of massive, broken, impersonal bureaucratic machinery.
without any spoilers the only radically different ending I know of was the USA TV broadcast ending (ends like 15 minutes earlier). I'm not sure you can even find this version.
AFAIK all the other versions are effectively the same except for a sutble difference. In one the background of the scene is the inside of a dark tower. In the other that tower fades to clouds. in both cases the main character is smiling so I'm not sure there much difference in meaning. I prefer the cloud version and have always wished for a large hi-res poster to frame of that image.
PS: one of my favorite movies. Saw it in the theater original release in the 80s. Owned VHS, then laserdisc, then DVD, then Bluray
Just to be clear, that's the US "TV" version. The US theater version has the same ending as all other versions (except for that minor thing of whether the tower fads or not)
