Oh Lucky Man! – Lindsay Anderson

dopo essere uscito dal college di "If...", Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) è entrato nel mondo reale e lavora in un'impresa nel settore del caffè.
Mick Travis fa un'ottima impressione ai dirigenti della società, e piano piano sale nella stima dei capi.
gira il mondo, vede di tutto, con quella sua faccia un po' così, che sale gli scalini del successo, come se non gli importasse.
la musica, dal vivo, è proprio come un personaggio del film.
abbi fiducia, guarda questo film, non ne fanno più così - Ismaele

… Il film è grottesco, d’avventura, con una vena horror, “O lucky man!” racconta le peripezie di un banale rappresentante commerciale nel settore del caffè che, nel suo peregrinare, va a sbattere via via il muso contro il mondo della pubblicità, del nucleare “segreto”, della medicina frankensteiniana, delle assurdità di esercito e polizia, dell’ipocrisia della giustizia, dell’ambivalenza della chiesa. Terribilmente e teneramente anni ’60. Due trovate filmiche vanno però sottolineate e valgono da sole la visione. Gli attori della prima parte si ritrovano nella seconda, ma.... interpretano ruoli che non hanno nulla a che fare con quelli iniziali. Non male. Infine, l’originalità della colonna sonora: non è fuori campo! Mi spiego: tra una scena e l’altra, si vede Alan Price, leggendario tastierista degli Animals di Eric Burdon, che canta e suona insieme al suo gruppo. Le canzoni sono bellissime. Comprai l’LP nel 1973...

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Le meilleur des mondes possible peut être vu comme une suite au très remarqué If… : après avoir traité du monde des collèges, Lindsay Anderson aborde cette fois l’étape suivante puisque son personnage principal, toujours interprété par Malcolm McDowell (1), est maintenant un jeune homme plein d’entrain et d’ambition qui se lance dans la vie active. C’est un peu une version moderne du Candide (le titre français reprend d’ailleurs une phrase de ce conte philosophique de Voltaire) car le jeune Mike va se heurter aux dessous du commerce, au nucléaire, au contre-espionnage, à la recherche médicale, à l’armée, au capitalisme international, à la justice, à l’Eglise, à la pauvreté, etc… Le film est ainsi une sorte d’épopée,  un parcours semé d’obstacles que notre Candide va surmonter avec un optimisme inébranlable qui lui donne un certain détachement ; il est pourtant très malmené et ne s’en sort pas toujours sans dommage, loin de là. Le meilleur des mondes possible met en relief les dessous et travers de notre société, dans lesquels brutalité et corruption reviennent souvent comme une constante. L’humour est aussi très présent. Certaines scènes sont assez surréalistes et peuvent évoquer l’approche d’un Luis Bunuel. Le film est original sous bien d’autres aspects : il est ponctué de morceaux chanté par Alan Price (ex-Animals), certains acteurs jouent plusieurs rôles successifs. Lindsay Anderson termine son film par une pirouette, un peu énigmatique (2). Durant presque trois heures, le film ne montre aucune longueur. Le Meilleur de mondes possible est un film vraiment remarquable, pas vraiment daté car son propos reste, somme toute, assez actuel.

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… O Lucky Man! is almost an anti-movie. Yes, Mick Travis develops in the sense that a wide eyed innocent cannot remain so for too much longer after being tortured for being a Russian spy – so he has some growing to do but as a structural beam, his journey does not serve as a foundation for a narrative – and yet it does. We have been browbeaten by what a film is and should be so much in the last 20 years that when something comes along (35 years ago, granted) that dispenses with Hollywood wisdom, punches Robert McKee in the solar plexus and puts the experience of experience front and centre, it's a breath of extra strong mint. There are ciphers and clichés and tropes and all manner of story telling crossroads and short cuts but Anderson seems hell bent on subverting almost every expectation. In turn, this keeps you guessing after every scene – politely punctuated by Anderson and his editor with a helpful two seconds of black spacing…

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Alcuni anni dopo il suo capolavoro "If...",  il geniale regista inglese Lindsay Anderson ripropone il personaggio di Mick Travis che comparirà ancora una volta nel terzo capitolo conclusivo della trilogia, "Britannia Hospital", (a breve su SubSoup sempre grazie alla nostra subber Grab) di questo "eroe" immaginario che ha il volto di Malcolm McDowell. Straordinaria ancora una volta la sua interpretazione (ma bravi tutti gli attori, alcuni ricoprono più ruoli) che arriva subito dopo quella nel  film più importante della sua carriera  e per il quale è famoso: "Arancia meccanica" di Kubrick. E il suo contributo va oltre il ruolo da protagonista: il film è infatti basato su un'idea dello stesso McDowell.

Il film è grottesco, stralunato, ricco di trovate assolutamente geniali lungo le tre ore di visione. Lo spirito anticonformista di Lindsay Anderson trova sfogo in una narrazione libera dove non manca satira e denuncia sociale. Da segnalare la colonna sonora "live": tra una scena e l’altra, si vede Alan Price che canta e suona. Chi lo guarda "è un uomo fortunato!"

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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?

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…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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