Les ailes

A schoolmistress, former glory of the USSR air force, reflects on her life.

Within the post-war cinema (1960s), it's one of the best Russian films I have ever seen.

By Larisa Shepitko, one of the best female directors of all time, 'Wings' is the portrait of a woman who, even with a stable and successful life, feels an enormous nostalgia, when remembering the days on the front line to defend her nation.

The pace, slow and calm, is perfect for the effect that Shepitko intended to do.

The love for the country overrides the personal romance, and family and social relationships are questioned, when the desire to return to the former glory days consumes insanely the little that she still has inside her.

It's also a pertinent approach to feminism, and the role of women in the Soviet hierarchy.

The cinematography is very good, with a fabulous composition.

This Russian film is about the fortunes of former war heroine flyer Nadezhda Petrukhina, who is working as a schoolteacher in the aftermath of the war and becoming increasingly dissatisfied with her lot. Her daughter Tanya (Zhanna Bolotova) has married an older man, Igor, who Petrukhina clearly thinks isn't good enough for her, while the teacher is herself courted by a museum director, Pavel Gavrilovich (Pantelejmon Krymov).

Centring on the former lady flyer and taking the film at a nice slow pace, we follow her through several days and activities such as going to a museum, catching up with old friends at the airfield, meeting Igor's more intellectualised friends, and chewing the fat with a cafe waitress, eventually waltzing with her to the strains of the Great Waltz.

'Wings' is a film of quiet beauty which remains long in the memory after you've seen it - whether it is the school play you remember, with the dancing Russian dolls, or the cleaner mopping the school corridors, or Boris the deputy head painting the walls, or the sight of Petrukhina muching sausage with the workers in the pub, or the final swoop of wings as she takes to the sky once more, or the flashbacks to her co-flyer sweetheart in the war.

Wings (1966)

How do we move on from our past glories? Can we? Do we even want to? Nostalgia is a powerful thing, sometimes too powerful for our own good. Larisa Shepitko's stunning debut feature Wings delves into these queries with the assured hand of an artist, executed in a patient and touching fashion.

Nadezhda Petrovna (Maya Bulgakova) is a former WWII fighter pilot hero struggles with her place in the world now that she is over forty and assigned as the head mistress of the provincial school, and seated in a meaningless bureaucratic post. When asked a question pertaining to her government field, she simply replies "I don't know anything." She is single, though in a loveless relationship with a museum curator. Her daughter has gone off and married an older man, yet Nadezhda has only met him over the phone. Of course, this hurts the lonely woman, so much so that she confides to her museum curator boyfriend that if she had been her real daughter she would have disowned her. She has nothing but memories and longings, and her job at the school. There she seems to find joy in fleeting moments. When one girl refuses to go on during a musical number, she puts on the girls costume instead so the others can still go on. But even there her life meets conflict. One student treats another, a girl, with physical cruelty. Nadezhda scolds him in front of a party gathering, after which he runs off. When he returns, he responds to question, "why?" with a blunt, "because I despise you." The film is juxtaposed with occasional flashbacks, usually just visuals - planes flying and soaring through the sky. But one turns out to be a fairly lengthy and dreamy rendering of a day out of the hospital with her love. the next sequence shows us how his plane went down, with Nadezhda on his tail. The plane crashes in a ball of flames, the wreckage captured in a swooping shot coming in overhead, freeze framing just directly above for moment, then moving on.

The glories she once knew, of love and heroism, a purpose in life, they're gone now, or so she feels. Her job at the school has the potential for a new purpose, but the cruelty only a couple students are enough to dissuade her from realizing that potential, and persuasion enough to leave the job and start anew. Her destiny is in the skies. After visiting with her daughter and her husband, who is entertaining his intellectual friends, she accuses her daughter of pitying her mother. She's just a plain old military woman, unsophisticated. Even though people seem to know her name and who she is everywhere she goes, its the truth.

There are many great movies about our yearning for the past, the desire to return to our glory days. Although Wings is a hearkening back to Nadezhda's military days and the difficulty of adapting to a peacetime life, perhaps drawing correlations to movies like The Best Years of Our Lives or Coming Home, it can equally be equated with films like Sunset Blvd. Wings though is just a different kind of film with a more touching execution. Although at times Nadezhda makes her situation more difficult than need be, she is always a sympathetic character.

Larisa Shepitko was one of the Soviet Unions unsung heroes. Her career lasted barely a decade, and she made only 4 films. I've seen two of them, this one and The Ascent, and both are nothing short of masterpieces. Sadly, she was killed in a car accident shortly after making The Ascent while scouting locations for her next project. Thankfully her work is again resurfacing thanks to the folks at Criterion. A boxset of Wings and The Ascent has been released through the Eclipse series.

Shepitko infuses her film with deep yearning painted in broad strokes. Her composition, even here in her first film, are assuredly artistic. The cinematography is stunning, particularly in the flashbacks. As beautiful as the film looks visually, and as stirring the direction is, the performance of Maya Bulgakova is at least the equal. Her portrayal of Nadezhda is nothing short of brilliant. She is able to convey so many emotions and express so much feeling with just a body language.

When she goes to visit the airfield, she climbs with struggle into a plane, dressed in her high heels and skirt. The men, overjoyed that the great Nadezhda Petrovna has come to visit, push her back to the hanger. The camera sits on her face for a few moments, as she moves from joy, to teary sadness, back to joy. The gesture is appreciated, but her destiny lies on the wings of love and steel birds.

(1966) Wings/ Krylya (In Russian with English subtitles) DRAMA/ SOCIAL COMMENTARY

In order for this film to be appreciated, 'one' must first consider the time it was made which is in 1966 and the place it was based on which is a small part of Russia during Stalin's rule since the film is near plot less and does instead states a single person's experiences, in this case happens to be a woman by the name of Nadezhda exceptionally played by Maya Bulgakova, playing a civilized normal woman who's starting to adjust back to normal civilization again after fighting on the Russian's side as a war pilot. Directed by critically acclaimed director by the name of Larisa Shepitko who has directed 4 feature films, this one is the third before she died from an unfortunate automobile accident at the age of 41. Aforementioned earlier, the film starts with a middle aged woman whose just being hailed as a war hero on national TV for shooting 12 planes down and now that the war's over, she's then presented for a job as a principal at a school, and barely starting, she's soon mocked by a bunch of school kids who're just being school kids, resulting to one of them to be expelled. She then tries to eat out at one of the fancy restaurants since the job she has can make her afford it who used to always eat at home, but upon trying to go in, the manager then stops her from going inside and tells her that because she's a female, she can only come in anytime after 6 PM if escorted by a male. She also has a daughter whose just coming out of university and finds out that she's already married and upon meeting him, doesn't really approve of him and later finds out that she's not really in love with him either. Can this be the result of this long absence of not conversing with her frequently as a result of the war! If anyone who is reading this review think that is all there is, well all I can say is that this is only a few examples she had to endure out of a film that's only an hour and a half. The only kind of happiness was when the war was still going on and when she was still defending Russia's skies which the movie uses flashbacks between the past and the present time. The best way to describe it is that it's the Russian equivalent to "The Best Years Of Our Lives" and "Til The End Of Time" and "the Hurt Locker" to name a few...with the difference is that she's a female and at the time was treated as a second class citizen living in a repressed Russian society.

An early film of famed Russian director Larisa Shepitko, "Wings" is the story of a Nadezhda (Mayya Bulgakova), a former pilot considered a hero of the state. Rewarded for her wartime exploits, she is now the principal of a vocational school. She also holds a largely inconsequential bureaucratic position.

Emotionally unfulfilled, she daydreams about flying and dogfights.

With a peripatetic plot that is almost "slice of life", "Wings" explores the quotidian details of her life--small emergencies at school, her unsatisfactory relationships with her daughter and with a male friend.

The result is an examination of midlife crisis, the transfer of the military lifestyle to civilian life, and a feminist view of job roles in society. Nadezhda seems clueless about the causes of her own dissatisfaction with life. And her students serve as surrogates for military comrades and her own children as she tries to organize her life in a manner she feels is correct.

This film lacks a focus that would make it more relevant.