“Return I will / To old Brazil”: The use of recurring space in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil

For a while now, I’ve wanted to point out something about the ending of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, and the way the film uses recurring space to visually convey its narrative. (Spoilers from this point on—and spoilers, too, for George Orwell’s 1984 and Federico Fellini’s 8½. Spoilers for everything!)

The last twenty minutes of Brazil see Sam Lowry, just like his literary forebear Winston Smith, captured and tortured. But whereas Smith comes to love Big Brother, Lowry goes mad, escaping into the recesses of his mind. But first Gilliam tricks the viewer into thinking what Lowry is thinking—that he’s escaped, having been rescued by Robert De Niro’s renegade heating and cooling system repairman Harry Tuttle.

If you pay close attention, however, you’ll see that Gilliam uses the film’s production design and cinematography to suggest that Lowry in fact never leaves the distinctive torture chamber (in reality a cooling tower at a South London power station). That vast circular space is defined by a runway that leads to a small circular platform:

After Lowry escapes with Tuttle and his men, he flees, only to encounter other spaces that visually recall that space—i.e., the room in which he’s actually still imprisoned.

The first such space is an exterior shot of the Ministry of Information, where a gravel path resembles the runway, and the imposing curved vertical design of the Ministry subtly recalls the torture chamber’s interior:

Tuttle and Lowry blow up the Ministry, only for Tuttle to get swallowed up by drifting papers (i.e., the bureaucracy). Lowry, now alone, runs from police forces, rushing down a narrow corridor that leads to an empty plaza, then another building. In doing so, he dashes down not one, but two runways that end in circular platforms:

The effect is particularly striking in the film. Lowry is running, but in reality, he’s not going anywhere. (Note also how the curved, vertically imposing building recalls the torture chamber interior.)

Lowry next finds himself inside a stylish church that’s hosting the funeral of his mother’s best friend, Mrs. Alma Terrain. Her rotating coffin lies at the end of—you guessed it—another long runway:

Lowry makes his way there, but the guards arrive once again, prompting Lowry to climb inside the coffin—which, according to the parallel structure that Gilliam’s established, is superimposed over the spot where the man is still sitting, in the torture chamber’s center. So even though Lowry thinks he’s escaping to the countryside with his lover Jill (Brazil’s version of Julia), we viewers can’t be entirely surprised when the film’s final moments reveal that, all this time, Sam’s remained strapped to that wicked looking chair:

… This recurring use of space has always stood out to me because, to the best of my knowledge, it’s unique in Gilliam’s filmography. (At least, I can’t think of another film where he’s done anything similar—but please let me know if I’m wrong!)

Some of the inspiration for the sequence is no doubt the logic of nightmares—that disquieting feeling that even though you’re running, you’re staying still (in fact lying still). At the same time though it seems to me that Gilliam was inspired here by Federico Fellini’s 8½. Certainly Gilliam has made no secret of the fact that Brazil was his attempt to combine Fellini’s masterpiece with George Orwell, to the point where he supposedly toyed with calling the movie 1984½.

8½, just like Brazil, features several scenes in which its protagonist, troubled director Guido Anselmi, escapes into his fantasies, the same way that Lowry seeks refuge in his dreams and, eventually, madness. Guido’s fantasies are visually distinct from one another, but they’re often accompanied by circus imagery and magic phrases and imagery (which are echoed and amplified by Nino Rota’s famous score).

Those twinned themes go a long way toward anticipating the fantastical sequence that concludes 8½. Guido tries to escape an agonizing press conference by shooting himself in the head, only for Fellini to reveal that to have been another fantasy. In reality, the science fiction movie that Guido’s been struggling to make gets canceled. But just as its rocket ship set is being struck, and the film production’s caravan of cars are pulling away, reality transforms once again before our eyes, as Guido picks up a megaphone and begins shouting instructions. Now a circus ringleader as well as a director (and assisted by a cadaverous magician), he organizes all of the people in his life—the whole cast of the film—into one final performance, ordering them to join hands and dance in a circle as a band plays:

The ending of 8½ is formally perfect: in one bravura stroke, Fellini resolves all of the film’s disparate plot lines, even as the haunting final shot suggests that Guido remains as lost and confused as ever—indeed, he’s regressed to childhood:

It’s plausible that Gilliam took from this the need for an image, or a recurring series of images, that communicated something similar for his own film: the impression that his hero “got away,” when in reality, he’s gone nowhere.