Satire could only be this magnificently surreal with a Monty Python man at the helm.

Terry Gilliam's frightening yet freakishly funny science-fiction film takes dystopia to new visual heights, its authoritarian, omniscient government regulated through a vast network of ducts -- and it is control of the ducts, obvious or subversive, that shifts the flow of information: and hence the flow of power itself. A Kafkaesque nightmare, but by golly it's pretty.

Jonathan Pryce stars as Sam Lowry, a mediocre, clerkish man working in an appallingly bleak government job, his godawful routine salvaged only by a vague recurring dream he has involving a beautiful woman he has never seen in real life. The world he lives in, however, depends on toeing the line to a T, and when he falls erratically in love, he upsets the entire bloody apple cart.

Originally titled 1984 1/2 -- as Gilliam's nod to George Orwell's iconic book and Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 -- Gilliam's film finds its title in a chimerical song from 1939, in the fact that a simple melody about Brazil, sung in a whole different tongue, can be evocative enough to a stranger to transport him to that land. In a landmark scene, Lowry's first day at work at the Ministry of Information Retrieval sees him perplexed as the receptionist knows exactly who he is.

It is Information Retrieval, after all. Sam heads up in an off-kilter lift that drops him lopsidedly onto an unpeopled floor, a nondescript sea of grey. Soon, like a piranha infestation, a crew of fast-moving executives pass through and Lowry attaches himself irrevocably to the head of the phalanx to meet his new boss, one making four decisions a sentence while greeting Sam, never breaking stride. Until he stops at Sam's door, revealing an office no bigger than a broom closet. It's a super scene, getting the audience level with Sam's utter haplessness: Click here for video.

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