For a brief period – which seemed to come and go like a dream – the Egyptian-Australian film-maker Alex Proyas was one of the coolest emerging directors in the world. The apotheosis of the music video-cum-feature film-maker’s coolness was his second feature, the 1994 goth-punk classic The Crow: a revenge fantasy set in a Gotham City-on-acid metropolis, starring a makeup-caked and black trench coat wearing Brandon Lee (who tragically died during an on-set accident).
Then there was Proyas’s spectacular follow-up, the Kafkaesque neo-noir Dark City: a surreal sci-fi set in a futuristic world where humans have become lab rats for an advanced but dying alien race. The top brass at Warner Bros seized the film and re-edited it, crowbarring their own botched version – which they considered more palatable for mass consumption – into cinemas. But hey, what’s cooler than a hotshot director making a movie the studios consider too daring to release?
The answer, perhaps, is a dazzling “lost” film returning to public consciousness after decades in the wilderness. This is Proyas’s visually gobsmacking 1988 feature debut, Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds, which has been newly restored by Umbrella Entertainment and released this week in Australia on DVD and Blu-ray for the first time (no word yet on an international release).
The film has always been difficult to find, having only ever had a home entertainment release – according to the distributor – on VHS in Australia and Japan. The restored version recently screened at the Melbourne international film festival, with yet-to-be-confirmed screenings (again, according to the distributor) to take place in Europe and the US.
It is a must-watch for lovers of out-there and intensely atmospheric cinema: an outback post-apocalyptic chamber piece about a lonely wheelchair user who dreams of building a flying machine that will enable him to escape his solitary existence.
Proyas conjures a parched Australian desert look full of hot and gluggy colours, crossed with a painting style aesthetic that practically dribbles from the screen: the sun-baked squalor of George Miller’s Mad Max movies meets the phantasmagoria of Vincent Ward (Vigil, The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey, What Dreams May Come). In a world where technological progress has halted, there are retro machines and gadgets and lots of hipstery art, much of it of western religion-related – the screwy contraptions of Buster Keaton meets the weird party vibes of Jesus Christ Superstar.
Striking opening images depict a figure walking across a desolate landscape. We see a bunch of rusty old cars positioned vertically, rising up like strange monuments, with bonnets on the ground and boots pointing towards the sky. Proyas shows dozens of artily decorated crosses then cuts to a row of power lines next to a road. This juxtaposition observes how something as simple as planks of wood can take on profound meaning, in this case religious and technological symbolism.
A nomadic stranger named Smith (Norman Boyd) arrives at the ramshackle home of Felix (Michael Lake) and Betty (Rhys Davis, credited as Melissa Davis). Felix befriends him and enlists Smith to help build his flying machine. It is debatable whether Felix’s obsession with literally flying away imparts a cynical message (viewing hope as a kind of madness) or an optimistic one (that even the worse situations can offer a chance to bounce back).
Michael Lake gives a weirdly erratic and compelling performance as Felix. He overacts in ways that suit the sparse surroundings – as if reaching out and screaming to be heard across a vast expanse of nothing. Flapping his hands, craning his eyebrows and scrunching his face, this overblown thespianism seems to have fallen right out of the silent film era. The same can be said of Rhys Davis. Smothered in makeup and dressed in bizarre costumes, she too feels airlifted out of the early decades of cinema. When she walks she stomps; when she talks she screams.
After Dark City, Proyas directed Garage Days – a frenetic dramedy about a band in Sydney who dream (like any other bunch of musos) of cracking the big time. The film’s energy keeps it watchable but the story is scattered and trivial. And boy, it felt like a step down from the director’s sensationally ambitious previous project, involving nefarious aliens and Kiefer Sutherland as a stuttering mad scientist.
Proyas returned to large-scale spectacle, drawing mixed results. He directed the decent (if Spielberg lite) I, Robot; the idiotic and pseudo profound Nicolas Cage blockbuster Knowing; and the execrable, whitewashed turkey Gods of Egypt. That last film feels like it was directed by nobody – with no sense of daring, vision or flair. All the things the once ultra-stylish director appeared to have in spades.
Where do we go from here? Back to the start, at least for Proyas’s diminishing fan base. Given the director’s meteoric rise and sobering fall, from balls-to-the-wall auteur to manufacturer of studio-produced sludge, now is a good time to experience the batshit crazy pleasures of Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds. The film harks back to a time when Proyas was – or was just about to become – hugely distinctive, bold, cool, head-turning. If this sounds too much like a lament, hope remains. At 54 years of age, the director has plenty of time left for a comeback.
