Death of a Bureaucrat

If Terry Gilliam wasn't greatly inspired by this 1966 Cuban film, there are an awful lot of coincidences in the air, from the Monty Python-esque animation sequence early in the film to the Brazil-style story line about bureaucracy gone amok. In Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's film, no doubt intended as a satire of communism but equally workable as a dig at big business, tells the tale of a worker who gets mangled to death in a machine of his own devising that mass-produced busts of the Communist party leader. Unfortunately, the man is buried along with a crucial piece of paperwork, thus kick-starting an endless quest by his nephew (Salvador Wood) to try to remedy the situation while being thwarted at every turn by myopic men in suits and their forms to fill out. Essentially a comedic reworking of Orson Welles' Kafka adaptation The Trial, Death of a Bureaucrat is laden with additional high-pedigree references, from Harold Lloyd to Luis Buñuel. There's plenty of slapstick, but the satire is also deft, starting with the opening credits written in the form of an overblown office memo. The film's central irony is that while the new government is staging rallies celebrating the death of capitalist bureaucracy, they've replaced it with an equally stifling and confusing system but are more interested in painting images of giant fists than reforming anything. How this scathing critique all got past the Cuban government is a mystery, but you don't have to be a refugee from a communist country to appreciate it: The film will ring true for anyone who has ever had to deal with financial aid in college, social security administration, the DMV, or any big bureaucracy more concerned with procedure than people.