It is very much a part of it.

What grew from that image is a story set in a bureaucratic state in which computers can get fudged up with horrific consequences, where every home has unreliable municipal services provided by the government for a submissively grateful public,
a society in which the average man finds solace from the frustrations of existence in Walter Mitty-style sexually symbolic dreams. Yet it is played for laughs, a comedic nightmare of a world.

Brazil is a thriller, a quest, a fantasy, a black comedy, a love story. It takes place at Christmas, somewhere in the 20th Century, where late night shopping is available to all, terrorist bombs kill and maim Only a few and most people are content to put their faith in the Security Forces.

The story centers around Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce), son of a late government minister and the beautiful, plastic-surgery freak, Ida Lowry. Sam is a resolutely unambitious clerk at the Ministry of Information records department whose quiet life is shattered through a bureaucratic blunder by Information Retrieval.

It is a portrait of a future so close that we look at it as if in retrospect--and either laugh or cry for help. Or both, if Gilliam is proven right when he predicts: 'People will catch themselves laughing and suddenly realize 'I shouldn't be laughing at that, that's horrendous.'

There is in vogue in France a term that gives an indication of what Gilliam is doing. It is the term 'retro-future,' a way of looking at the future through the past, of revealing, so to speak, the other side of now. But the director stresses that all of that is incidental, just a backdrop to what he sees as a lighthearted nightmare.. .a very funny film about a young, unambitious man and the girl he falls for faced with situations entirely beyond their control.