I'm a frequent but casual movie viewer and I really enjoyed this film. I often find films enjoyable that deal in (for me) obscure themes and genres. So I was intrigued that this was produced in the Soviet Union in 1966, which was solidly in the cold war era. Add to that actors I couldn't possibly recognize playing roles I don't typically see and spare but careful direction and production, and for me this was a winner. Uncontrived and unpretentious. The themes it dealt with were (IMO) surprisingly "unpatriotic/heroic" and not propagandist. There's a nice balance of pathos and irony and, contrary to at least one of the other reviews, the film is not humorless at all. If there is more Soviet-era cinema like this I would be interested to see it.

Nadezhda (aka Nadya), a school director and WWII heroine pilot is greatly respected by everybody. When she expels a boy from school for pushing a girl (she started it) Nadya gets to thinking. She had to make it in a man's world and has to continue being tough every day (deny her femininity, in a way) to get ahead. But is she maybe overdoing it a little? When offered a dance she declines although she would probably like to, and she denies that there is anything more than a platonic friendship between her and a male museum director. In what situations can she allow letting her guard down, allow being seen as a woman? She and her adopted daughter are more like good acquaintances, having completely different ideas about life and about being a woman. Where did she go wrong? She meets women who are quite happy with the modest roles assigned to them, apparently a lot happier than her. Is this the life she wanted? All this thematically rich contemplating and melancholy of Nadya's happens without words. Mostly what we see is Nadya doing her job, administrating, exchanging words with people who recognize her, dealing with a young student who looks up to her, wandering around, going to bars, etc. She clearly isn't all stern and cold, she puts on a matryoshka doll costume to perform in a school play when a student suddenly drops out, she has a little personal woman-to-woman talk with a bar woman and then waltzes with her through the deserted bar, she gets giddy practically as soon as she smells alcohol and hence makes a fool of herself at her daughter's wedding celebration. In between all this we often see her thinking. What she really thinks about mostly is up to the viewer to interpret. One reviewer, for example, figured that Nadya's thoughts are purely those of nostalgia, for she is stuck in the glory days of her past while the present passes her by. Well, some of the things I think she thought about you can read in the first paragraph, so this review is thereby concluded.

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.

No doubt KRYLYA is the finest film ever made by a woman, by the greatest woman director of all time - Larisa Shepitko. Its only real competition might be Shepitko's THE ASSENT.KRYLYA may be the better picture because the subject is much smaller and self contained, like a little diamond every facet tirelessly polished, glittering and reflecting. It is the precision, of the rendering of a personality, and the storytelling which is so impressive. Nothing extraneous, not one wasted minute. The story is an in depth portrait of a woman, Nadezhda Petrukhina, Hero of the Soviet Union, delegate to the city's soviet and a high school principal, as well as a judge of the local talent contest. In the course of the film she takes on and performs a variety of other tasks, including a last minute substitution for a love sick girl as a giant matryoshka doll at a dance performance.She is a driven, perpetual motion machine. It is one of the miracles of this film that, having now seen it three or four times, each viewing reveals scenes to me which I've misremembered or which didn't exist at all. I seem to have remembered a six hour film and not a 90 minute one. At one point Petrukhina goes to the apartment of a troubled student who she has threatened to expel and who has run away. I've always remembered the disorganized interior of the apartment, liquor and beer bottles scattered, etc. In fact she never enters the apartment, an old lady, with a lame excuse, keeps the door on its chain as she speaks through a crack in the door. The illusion of having seen the inside is accomplished by having the old woman misunderstand Petrukhina, thinking she was looking for the older brother who was in prison, and mentioning that the younger brother ran away because his father beat him.Really this film is rather spare with the details yet they expand fulsomely in one's memory, truly a film which has more than meets the eye. When introduced, Petrukhna is seen buying a new suit. The salesman, in passing, notes that the material she has selected is the same as the curtains hung over the dressing cubical's thresholds. She is measured by the numbers ("A standard size...") and the cut of her suit is unflatteringly severe in the extreme. She has a dead butch haircut with steely gray highlights. She is a formidable presence who somewhat frightens those of less determined character. She is non-stop brusk even when she takes the time to forcibly instill cheerfulness into a social situation.Besides coping with the social problems of her hormonally challenged students, her step daughter is marring a much older man. This man is in his mid-thirties and once divorced, yet he is not quite of Petrukhina's generation, the generation which fought the war and sacrificed everything. She tries to act celebratory but her daughter's circle of friends are quite uneasy in her presence. Later, during a discussion with her daughter, who wants her to retire, Petrukhina wants to know who would do her job? "Let somebody else do it." which are words which go through her like a knife. "I never knew those words" she says.She is quite a solitary figure and even though she is going from one honor to the other she is growing ever more isolated and even feeling lonely. She spends a day walking through town trying to relax. It beings to rain but she is so repressed the rain on her face has no effect. At least not on the surface but we flash back to being caught in the rain with her lover. They are in a military hospital recovering from wounds received on the front. They are both fighter pilots who trained together and now have been re-united. He is hero enough to get transferred to her unit. Then there is the day, when, after shooting down a German fighter plane, he is hit by flak. As his plane descends in a deadly diagonal trailing a straight line of smoke, her plane circles, helplessly, like a mother elephant trying to somehow stave off the already arrived death of her child by making it stand up. Her pleading and unanswered voice shrilly cries out the name of her lover without a flicker of a response. The plane crashes into the earth. She flies over the scattered burning pieces of the wreckage. This is what is at her core. Everything since then has been purely duty.She has some kind of relationship with the director of the local Natural History Museum. While going through the museum she hears a lecture about famous people from the area and she hears the story of her lover who shot down 17 planes and was a Hero of the Soviet Union and then her name, 12 planes, and Hero of the Soviet Union. One child asks if they were still alive. She realizes that she has become, literally, a museum exhibit. She impulsively asks the museum director to marry her and then leaves without an answer.She goes out to the airfield to see another friend and sees an acrobatic training aircraft unattended. She struggles to climb up on its wing but makes it to the cockpit. She sits dreamily for a while when the students find her and decide to give her a treat by pushing her around while she sits there.In a scene which transcends the figurative and the literal, she sees the gaping black maws of the hanger approaching ever closer. She is on the last lap of life. She switches the engine on and taxis away, students giving up the chase, and then she launches the plane into the air, the actual release from earth's bounds profoundly liberating as the plane climbs ever higher into the sky until it disappears as she watches planet earth pass by her far below.