QWhy is it called Brazil?
AIt is named after the song "Aquarela do Brasil", known in the English-speaking world simply as "Brazil", written by Ary Barroso, which Sam is humming in the final scene when Jack and Mr. Helpmann consider him catatonic. You can also hear the melody in Michael Kamen's score and the song opens the film before the title is show in neon.The myth behind the name of the film relates to Terry Gilliam being at a beach in the UK one day. Apparently the weather wasn't particularly great, but a man was sitting on the beach alone listening to the famous song (on a stereo) that we hear in the film. Gilliam was fascinated by the man sitting there despite all the "adversity", and this became the theme and title for the film.
ABasically it's about the crush of technology and it's effect on society. It's also about life in a totalitarian dystopic society sometime in the near future. You'll notice that most of the technology in the film fails constantly -- the heating ductwork in Sam's apartment, the robot that Jill hits when trying to find out what happened to Harry Buttle, the mistake that leads to Buttle's arrest, even Sam's failure to simply send a compensation check to Buttle's widow. Director Terry Gilliam is trying to tell us that technology, despite having made the lives of human's easier, fails constantly and causes us more problems than solutions.The dystopian society that's presented in the film is often thought of as an interpretation of George Orwell's seminal novel 1984, which presented a bleak vision (much bleaker than this one) of the future where the lives of humans were controlled by a central system known only as "Big Brother". Humans were monitored for any form of thought that Big Brother believed would disrupt the system it had created.
QWhat is the gift Sam keeps getting and giving?
AFrom the Brazil FAQ v1.3: "An executive decision maker. . . it has a plunger that can fall to one side of a divider, landing on "YES" or "NO"."
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