Terry Gilliam screened a strangely wonderful movie called Toto le Heros (”Toto the Hero”), by Jaco van Dormael at IFC Center last night. Waltzing up the stage behind a Tideland poster/begging sign he carried earlier in the day before Jon Stewart fans in the Daily Show ticket line, he introduced the movie saying he first saw it in London with Richard LaGravenese right after they finished The Fisher King in 1991. They both fell in love with it and said they would die to make a movie like this.

We enter the film through an apparent crime scene into the world of on old man looking back on his life with regret and a desire for revenge. Thomas (Toto) believes he was switched in a nursery fire with Alfred, the boy next door. As a result, he sees Alfred as living the life he was meant to have, and we get to see both his reality and the fantasy life he imagines was his birthright.

His biography unfolds as we travel back and forth between different periods of his life, played by 3 different actors. Thomas’s jealousy and sense of being a victim shape choices that create cascades of loss and keep him from enjoying his life and the love that surrounds him. Even though his trajectory seems semitragic, van Dormael takes us on a joyful and humorous ride through imagination, memory and absurdity to a surprisingly happy ending (that includes a plastic bag scene much more beautiful than the one it must have inspired in American Beauty).

After the film, Terry came back out for questions and answers. When asked if he ever wanted to be someone else. “No,” he replied, “I guess I’m rather content being miserable being me.”

He said his visual style had been most influenced by “watching the radio” as he grew up. He was left to his own imagination to flesh out the stories until TV arrived home at age 12.

He also joked he was threatening legal action against George Bush and Dick Cheney for the unauthorized remake of Brazil — we’re living it!

assorted related:

Ikiru makes an interesting contrast and complement to Toto Le Heros on the “get busy living” theme.

The new Bob Thurman Podcast from his talk in Thimphu, Bhutan on “Buddhism, Gross National Happiness and the Current Global Crisis,” (Don’t you just love the scope?) resonates with themes that emerge in Toto le Heros and Terry’s talk like “what is the nature of reality,” “how to be happy” and “time, eh… not so linear,” and offers a useful realization.

Not so into the inevitability of your current body aging and dying? Aubrey de Grey explains how he’s approaching the issue as an “engineering problem” in the latest TedTalks. Alas, solving that “problem” creates a whole host of new issues that portend a rather dystopian universe, but then we are granted more time to figure that all out.

Terry Gilliam obtains the rights to Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens for a groat. (Yay! Looking forward to this movie…)