When Jonathan Pryce's Sam Lowry, the bureaucrat at the center of Terry Gilliam's mad chef d'oeuvre, Brazil (1985), goes to work in the Department of Information Retrieval, his office resembles a badly multiplexed movie theater.
Saturday at 10:15 a.m., in the Wheeler Auditorium of the Enoch Pratt Free Library downtown, the Pratt's Film Talk series will present Brazil - and with the fate of the Senator uncertain (anyone who hasn't seen the new print of Akira Kuroswa's Rashomon should rush there now), it's critical for Baltimore movie fans to support film organizations and events like Film Talk, which continue to cater to movie lovers.
Out of cabaret, sci-fi, comic strips and maybe some Classics Illustrated versions of Orwell and Kafka, director Gilliam, one of Monty Python's founding members, pulls together a vision of a neo-fascist near-future. The plot is daunting and rickety - an enormous inverted pyramid resting on Pryce's widow's peak. It starts when a bug gets caught in the workings of a government machine and results in a mistaken arrest. In order to protect his dream girl (Kim Greist) when she protests the alleged wrongdoer's arrest, Lowry must rebel against the authorities. But the movie itself is the major act of rebellion. It's ironic that Gilliam fought with Universal chief Sidney Sheinberg - one of Steven Spielberg's mentors - over the completion and release of this movie. For in many ways it's like a bleak, dirty-minded Steven Spielberg film. You can see why J.K. Rowling wanted Gilliam to direct the Harry Potter movies - and why the suits at the studios wouldn't stand for it.
