Krylya (Wings) - Larisa Shepitko

Larisa Shepitko, morta giovane, purtroppo, è la regista di un film straordinario come questo.
Krylya è solo un gran bel film, in un bellissimo bianco e nero..
Nadezhna dirige una scuola tecnica, ha degli alunni non facili, di cui uno, Sergei Bystryakov, ha una certa somiglianza con Malcolm McDowell.
Nadezhna ha un'aria triste, deve dirigere quella scuola, ha un rapporto non facile con una figlia adottata, sogna la libertà di essere in volo; a terra, per quanto si impegni e sia positiva, sembra essere come l'albatros goffo di Baudelaire.
buona visione - Ismaele

…While Wings shares much in common with Dovzhenko and Grigori Chukrai (Ballad of a Soldier), this is, unlike the work of her male colleagues, a relatively contemporary film by a woman and about a woman, which builds towards a conclusion as soaring and heartbreaking as the one that ends Nadezhna’s story. Werner Herzog’s astounding 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs To Fly still can evoke tears when one recalls the final images as the title subject has a dream come true. A similar and extraordinary sequence occurs at the end of Wings and delivers the kind of impact that only movies can bring when a dream comes true.
In both cases the wish fulfillment is endowed with both elation and heartache.
Shepitko firmly roots her character in a past that seems so far away and yet, truth and redemption are found in the reclamation of that past – albeit a reclamation that embraces the present and includes an acceptance of the future.
Shepitko only made three features following this debut. Her life was tragically cut short in a car accident while on a location scout for what would have been her fifth feature.
Like Nadezhna’s dashing flyboy lover, Shepitko died while doing what she knew and loved best.
Great art and life are never that far apart, are they?

da qui

…Many of Shepitko's illustrious school contemporaries such as Tarkovsky and Parajanov and her distinguished surviving director husband Elem Klimov went onto international fame, while the just as talented Shepitko fell under the radar and is not as well known today in the cinema world as her compatriots.

The 42-year-old Nadezhda Petrukhina (Maya Bulgakova) is a decorated war hero fighter pilot from World War II and has been rewarded by the Soviet state with a position as the principal of a provincial trade school and a post as people's deputy in the city council. This heroic woman is single and has an estranged adopted daughter (Zhanna Bolotova) getting married to an older teacher (Vladimir Gorelov), who has embarrassed mom by not introducing him to her until she forces the issue and bursts in on him in his apartment while he's entertaining his intellectual friends. 

Nadya finds it uncomfortable being the stern authority figure disciplining unruly students who are proud of their independent spirit, something she once had but now feels like a relic only going through the motions of living. The reasonable heroine shows a good humor with everyone and displays empathy for her students even while making them be responsible for their actions. She's also locked into a loveless romance that's going nowhere with the museum director (Pantelejmon Krymov), in whose museum Nadya is on exhibit with other pilots and stuffed animals for her war heroism. That scene in the museum tells you all you want to know about where the pic is heading, as Nadya's present when a visiting class is taken on tour and one little girl asks the guide: "Is the pilot Nadezhda Petrukhina still alive?"

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The romance of war has seldom been so heartbreaking than in the hands of the great Ukrainian-born director Larisa Shepitko who made this first feature after a few short films and studying under the watchful eye of fellow countryman and master film artist Oleksander Dovzhenko. What’s especially bittersweet is that the film is set in a post-war Soviet world where the lead character Nadezhna (Maya Bulgakova) struggles to settle into a life of seeming normalcy and, compared to her career as a fighter pilot, complacency. Now in her fortieth year, she works as a schoolmistress and goes about her daily tasks with professionalism and commitment on the surface, but always yearning and dreaming of the days when she soared above the normal world – touching Heaven, surrounded by the billowy clouds and racing through the air, dipping and swooping like a bird of prey.
Shepitko, part of that breed of Soviet filmmaker that rejected the occasionally overwrought montage-heavy storytelling of the likes of Eisenstein, tells her delicate tale with the same kind of editorial restraint common to her generation. Favouring gorgeously composed tableaus and a stately pace, Shepitko aims her lens at the realism of Nadezhna’s life, but with such a keen eye that the commonplace becomes extraordinary…

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… Her longing to break free asserts itself frequently throughout the film. As we all do at moments of stress, disappointment, or boredom, Nadya escapes into daydreams. She imagines an open sky around her, the sun peeking through clouds, as Shepitko’s camera dips and tilts from inside Nadya’s thoughts. During a sojourn to a riverside beach, Nadya watches planes glide through the sky doing barrel rolls and finds herself traveling to the nearby airfield where one of her former comrades is training these pilots. The two reminisce and talk about getting the gang together for dinner and drinks, though they and we know this gathering will never happen. Too much time and life have passed. Nadya has only her memories now, including one of the man (Evgeniy Evstigneev) she would have married had his plane not crashed, and her duty. As she tells Tanya, “I never even knew such words as these: ‘Let someone else do it.’”…

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