Directrospective: SPIRITS OF THE AIR, GREMLINS OF THE CLOUDS (1989)

Notes on the films of Australian director Alex Proyas.

Three shadowy figures pursue the mysterious stranger Smith across a stunningly photographed wasteland.

This is the first entry in a new Directrospective series here on the Jake Internet Dot Com Web Site, focused on the work of the Australian director Alex Proyas, known for visionary science and fantasy films like THE CROW and DARK CITY. Proyas’s films are strikingly visual, with dazzling production design and special effects that help to compensate for underbaked philosophical themes that aren’t as revolutionary as the films think they are. To be perfectly transparent, I mostly started this project as an excuse to re-watch and write about his most recent film, 2016’s GODS OF EGYPT, which is a completely bugnuts sword-and-sandal-and-Iron-Man-tech effects extravaganza that nobody saw even though it’s a deranged delight. Look for that thrilling conclusion next week. As always, though, this Directrospective starts at the beginning.

I guess I didn’t really think about it, but I had assumed that THE CROW was Proyas’s first movie. Having now seen his feature debut, SPIRITS OF THE AIR, GREMLINS OF THE CLOUDS, I’m not convinced I was wrong. SPIRITS is visually stunning and impressively realized considering its A$500,000 budget, and its score is outstanding, but it’s also gruelingly dull to sit through. It’s about two pounds of movie in a nine-pound bag.

What story there is is very simple. A drifter named Smith (Norman Boyd, credited very Australially as “The Norm”) wanders alone through the desert past an eerie field of crosses and some gorgeously ruined, like, stick buildings, until he comes upon a small house. Smith meets Felix Crabtree (Michael Lake) and his sister Betty (Melissa Davis), who have lived in the house since their religious fundamentalist father brought them out there decades prior. Their father has long since died and the siblings grown into middle age, with wheelchair-bound Felix having become obsessed with flying machines and Betty slipping into a volatile, detached religious fanaticism like her father’s, changing her hair and elaborate makeup several times a day. Proyas doesn’t give too much away about what’s happened, but theirs is clearly a world that has already seen its apocalypse. Felix and Betty sit in their little house eating potatoes and going crazier and crazier each day; they’re excited to have someone new to talk to. Smith reveals that he’s being followed and intends to cross the mountains to the north. Felix tells him they can’t be crossed on foot, but is eager for Smith to help him to build an experimental aircraft that the three of them can use to fly over the mountains together. Betty hates Smith and accuses him of being the or at least a devil. After a few disastrous test flights, Felix reveals that his mad quest to build a flying machine is what landed him in his wheelchair to begin with, and other wanderers like Smith may have even died trying to help him achieve his dream. But it seems like they might actually be onto something with their latest contraption, and they begin preparations for their flight as Smith’s pursuers close in. The night before they plan to leave, Betty announces she isn’t going along. She wants to stay at home and take care of her father’s grave like she always has, and a defeated Felix decides he’s going to stay with his sister to improve Smith’s chances. As Smith flies away and Betty plays her strange zither for her dead father, Felix sits on the porch and waits for the three shadowy figures that approach the house.

The biggest issue with SPIRITS is that it’s paced like Tarkovsky but without any of the depth. There’s a student-film quality to the way we’re shown each actor doing whatever they’re doing for at least twice as long as necessary to get the point across. Unless the film is about process and routine, there’s no reason to show Betty chopping several potatoes in their entirety. This isn’t JEANNE DIELMAN. Dialogue is equally tedious, with the characters saying the same thing several different ways. Sure, the tedium we go through as the viewer puts us closer to the delirious state in which Felix and Betty live their whole lives, but this is a movie about liberation, not about boredom. When the liberation finally comes, it doesn’t feel like enough payoff for all that we’ve endured so far (in fairness, this is probably due to the difficulty of staging aerial sequences on half a million Australian bucks). The molassal pace is the result of Proyas stretching a short film conceit to 93 minutes.

Even in his first film, much of the later Proyas is present. The film is truly gorgeous, photographed by David Knaus in the same desert near Broken Hill, New South Wales that has played a barren, inescapable hell in other films like THE ROAD WARRIOR, WAKE IN FRIGHT, and RAZORBACK. The glacial slowness and stunning red, yellow, and blue desert make the experience of watching the film feel like staring at the cover of Midnight Oil’s Diesel and Dust for an hour and a half. The interior of the house, with its shafts of light cutting through the dust and Betty’s ornate candlelit altars everywhere, is an arresting cross between a Leone western and a particularly Catholic Madonna video.

Revelation and liberation, two of Proyas’s favorite thematic concerns, are here in his very first film. As ever, they’re overshadowed by the extensive production design, but they’re there if you can stay awake long enough to find them. Betty and Felix are hopelessly confined to their little house, her by her religious fervor and sense of duty to her father, him ironically by his delusional ambition to get out. Trying to get unstuck from the house got him stuck in a chair. Most of Proyas’s protagonists are confined, physically or intellectually or both, often by some malevolent force pulling the world’s strings. Escape feels impossible, to the extent that they’re even aware of their confinement. It’s only when someone from outside - Smith, here - comes around and challenges what the confined think is possible that they have a chance to break free. As so often happens in his films, though, that freedom isn’t granted to everyone equally. Smith is the reason that Felix is able to realize his dream of building an airplane, but when the time comes it’s only Smith who gets to use it. The physically disabled man and the mentally ill woman have to stay behind in the same place where they’ve been trapped for years, and now their would-be liberator has led a group of spooky dudes right to their house. In some ways, this first film is more aware of the sadness of this kind of freedom than the later works. Dull as goddamn rocks, though.

Later today: THE CROW.