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.

This is a film directed by Larisa Shepitko--a woman whose life was cut very short at age 41. Because Russian movies are generally pretty tough to come by here in the US and because her career was short, there aren't a lot of opportunities to see her films."Wings" is a very slow-moving film. This isn't necessarily a criticism--just a comment on the style. Instead of telling the viewer a lot about the lady who is the subject of the film, you slowly begin to learn more about her as she appears to be in the throes of an existential crisis.Nadezhda Petrovna is a woman in her early 40s, though she appears much older. She is the principal of a high school but seems vaguely dissatisfied with her job and personal life. Watching her, she seems rather sexless and emotionally stunted--and a bit lost. As the film unfolds, you learn through brief flashback scenes that she was a pilot during WWII and apparently since then, she has been in a bit of a fog. And, the only time she smiles or seems at ease is when in an airplane. Throughout nearly all of the film, Petrovna walks about in a rather tentative and slow-motion manner--and it may take some getting used to in order to enjoy the film. Perhaps 'enjoy' is not the right word, as this isn't meant to be enjoyed but more appreciated for the character study that it is. Visually and especially musically, this is a very, very good film--very evocative but slow and with a rather vague ending that might disappoint many. I give it a 7, as it IS a quality production--but not one that I'd heartily endorse.By the way, while this is NOT a funny film and won't elicit a lot of laughs, I did love seeing the school play where a few of the kids were dressed like nesting dolls (matryoshka dolls). This was pretty cute.

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.

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.