Spirits of the Air - Gremlins of the Clouds

   1988's Spirits of the Air - Gremlins of the Clouds (what a title!) puts its best foot forward. As its credits roll, they're intercut with footage of a man clad in black advancing through the desert, walking by some pretty stunning bits of near-surrealist wreckage: Oversized crooked utility poles, a car graveyard where the cars are the headstones, a ridiculously complex set of wooden rigging. When he arrives at a dusty farm, he scares a woman who was playing along to the beautiful title song on what looks like a mixture between a shamizen and a kokyu; he promptly collapses of exhaustion as the woman panics and goes to get her brother.
 It's one hell of an opening, as beautiful as anything I've seen in a while.

I could fill this thing with screenshots; it's a gorgeous movie.

 The hiker is Smith (Norman Boyd), a drifter running away from... let's call them bad guys - for unspecified reasons. It doesn't matter. The woman, Betty (Melissa Davis), is a religious nutjob who dons a new elaborate outfit, makeup and hairpiece for almost every scene, and her brother Felix (Michael Lake) is wheelchair-bound and flight-obsessed. Yep, it's going to be a weird one.

 Especially when you realize that the movie is, more than anything else, a willfully quirky psychodrama. Felix takes Smith in and nurses him back to health, much to his sister's chagrin (she's convinced he's the devil). Once the newcomer comes back to, Felix talks him into helping build his flying machines, luring him with the prospect of getting over the mountains that bar the way north. And so the household settles into a routine - Felix and Smith try to get their creations off the ground, while Betty seethes in the background, with the unspoken threat that her insanity might escalate beyond childish hissy fits and bizarre passive-aggressiveness into actual violence.

 It's a very, very weird movie, but if (and this is a very big if) you can get over its languid pacing and the sometimes very broad acting, there's a lot to like here.
 Not the least the production design. This was Alex Proyas's first movie, and the amount of detail and invention on the sets is really impressive. Every scene has been fussed over and has at least a couple of cool touches; "MTV video directors" was a charge levied at a lot of people a few decades ago who tried to inject some style into their movies (Proyas's fellow Aussie director Russell Mulcahy was a perennial target), and... well, yeah, this is a very 80's-MTV-video looking movie. It definitely tends to put style before substance.
 Most people have gotten over using that particular zinger to put down movies a long time ago, especially when the style is as good as it is here. The ridiculously elaborate sets and costumes combine with some great cinematography (DP: David Knaus), saturated colours and a couple instances of Proyas's penchant for unorthodox camera placement to great effect.

 The near lack of a plot is probably the biggest problem here. The script (written by Proyas) is not bad - the dialog is sometimes clunky but it mostly works, and the siblings at the heart of the story do eventually get a little depth; Enough to allow for some effective bits of pathos towards the end (some of it ably aided by the production design (Sean Callinan) - Felix's room is a good example) which I at least found pretty affecting.
 But, as far as actual plot... nothing much happens.

 I'd be lying if I said it didn't drag at points, but the film had me firmly under its spell for the duration after those amazing first few minutes. Australia is a pretty dependable source of genre oddities, and few of them are as odd, cool looking, or beguiling as this.