Exercises marked with (*) require further reading/search beyond the suggested texts.
1. (*) View and summarize Terry Gillian's movie Brazil. Why are there two versions for the ending?
Answer:
The story in Brazil develops in a sort of futuristic world in terms of technology for automation of some domestic tasks, but at the same time resembling the forties of the 20th century. In this world, there is a totalitarian regime perpetuated by an entity called the Ministry of Information, which claims to have all the Information about the citizens.
Cities are often scenarios of terrorist attacks executed by rebels. One of the main purposes of the Ministry of Information is to procecute legally all the rebels, since they are considered as terrorists.
The story begins when, due to a bug in the system (a fly stuck in a printer) of the department of Information Retrieval of the Ministry, an order of detention was misprinted with the name of an innocent man, now considered as a suspect of terrorist acts. This man was abducted violently from his apartment while spending the night with his family. One neighbour of his, Jill Layton, witnessed the act and decided to sue the Ministry of Information for this.
Days later, after realizing their error, the Ministry sent Sam Lowry, the main character of the movie, to deliver a check to the abducted man's wife. The man had been tortured while interrogated by the department of Information Retrieval and died. While staying in the devastated wife's home, Sam saw Jill and immediately recognized the lady he had constantly been dreaming of; in spite of the hair, both were the same. Jill left so Sam could not talk to her.
Back to work, Sam looked for information about Jill, hoping to see her again, and found out that the Ministry knew about the demands and planned to charge her with terrorism, so she wouldn't be able to make public their error; she would be arrested that afternoon. He decided to find her.
Through many hard situations, Sam and Jill met and fell in love with each other. Sam managed to infiltrate the official records of the Ministry and altered the information about Jill to make her appear as dead, but all that was in vain: soon they were captured.
Sam was going to be interrogated and tortured, and knew that Jill had died by resisting to their capture. However, before the torture started, the rebels barged in and saved Sam. After a long persecution, Sam finally managed to escape, and in the distance saw Jill alive, smiling at him.
Unfortunately, his rescuing and everything that went on after it was just an hallucination (Sam was very prone to often scape from reality) and he had remained there, in the torture room, completely mad and humming happily. The men around declared him a lost cause.
Regardless of the alternative versions the film had due to various releases, there are two different endings: one in which the escape was an hallucination, Jill was dead and Sam went completely mad, and another in which the escape really occurs, Sam and Jill encounter and escape to a farm supposedly out of the domains of the ministry. That was because the happy ending was considered to be more consumer-friendly. For further information, the IMDb article about this matter can be consulted.
The one reference to Brazil in the film was the fact that Sam used to sing an English version of Ary Barroso's song Aquarela do Brasil. In the English-speaking world the song is better known simply as Brazil. Various versions of the tune were played during the film.
© 2015 Joao Meidanis