Krylya (1966)

Wings
1966

Director: Larisa Shepitko
Starring: Marya Bulgakova, Zhanna Bolotova,
Pantelemion Krymov, Leonid Dyachkov,Vladimir Gorelov,
Yury Medvedev, Nikolay Grabbe, Zhanna Alexandrova

Last month has been incredibly stressful for me, and writing for the blog has been the last thing on my mind. That I post at all is thanks to the drafts that I bank for just such occasions as these; and just so that my blog doesn't just shrivel up and die. So, when my husband offered to write up a film for me (he knew I wouldn't), I jumped at the offer. So, for those who are used to my husband lamenting on my blog, and writing dotty little ditties everywhere... over to Sadanand Warrier.

I normally try to see as many films as possible about aeroplanes and so, when Netflix, with their questionable data mining, suggested Wings to me, I decided to put it in the queue.  I like movies about piston engine aeroplanes where you still took time to move from spot A to spot B, you had fewer instruments to deal with and therefore more time to ruminate, but not quite fall asleep on auto-pilot.

Krylya (Wings) was also a Criterion Collection release and was the debut film of a Soviet woman director Larisa Shepitko. I must confess I had not heard of either the director or the film, so in settling down to watch it, there was an air of nervous expectation, underlined by my wife’s disapproving look. She was in the mood for a masala film but it was my turn to inflict her with my choice of ennui.

Not entirely unexpectedly, the film turned out to be less about aeroplanes and flying, and more about a St.Exupery-esque longing for a time when one felt alive. Possibly, all of us go through a time when one feels truly in harmony with everything, even though the chances were that nothing was truly in harmony with anything.  And that is the story that the film tells.

The story of a once-upon-a-time fighter pilot in the Soviet Air Force in the Second World War.  A story that deals only briefly with the war - we  see it through the eyes of our heroine who, several years later in peace-time Soviet Union, plods through her work as the principal of a vocational school. She lives alone and is somewhat estranged from her adopted daughter who has fled her mother’s grey life and married an older man.

Our heroine is Nadhezdha Petrukhina (Maya Bulgakova), former fighter pilot and winner of several medals for bravery in the Second World War. Honoured by the state, and now principal of the vocational school that has just been commended for a diploma, she tries to be a good administrator, but does not understand her students just as she had never understood her daughter. Or perhaps she does, but knows only too well how, sometimes, life can crush the living. She is too caught up in her own lack of living to understand some of her troubled students who, in turn, admire her for what she was, but despise her for her attempts to understand them. She is very particular about details - a throwback to her wartime experience where a trifle could mean the difference between life and death - and cannot understand the laissez-faire attitude of young people today. 

When alone, Nadhezdha often gazes out of the windows of her concrete apartment block, or from a vantage point on a bridge across the river - but she does not see the scene before her. Instead, she views the world through the perspex glass of a fighter plane’s wind-shield as the wind sweeps her up and the horizon tilts with the plane. When she takes her neighbour’s children out on a Sunday they go to the aerodrome where her old comrades teach young recruits to fly. The air force doesn’t need her anymore but she finds joy in her past  and she teaches the children to sing.
Where the infantry won’t get through

Where an armoured train won’t pass

Where a tank cannot crawl through

There the steel bird will fly. 

When she goes to meet her adopted daughter and her daughter’s husband,  Nadhezhdha is a stranger in their apartment and amongst their friends. She cuts the cake she brings as a peace offering, the slicing of the cake showing her frustration at being closed out of her daughter’s life.

A bit of a martinet, Nadhezdha is conscientious enough to help her students in a competition that her school has entered to the point of substituting on the stage as a large Matryoshka doll.   

The director provides a shape to her heroine's character through small incidents, such as when Nadhezdha struggles with a synonym for 'initiative', for instance, and a young student asks her, “Why do you need a new word?”. Or when an old lady, the grandmother of the boy who is missing from school, offers her a piece of sweet bread in exchange for five minutes of conversation. 

 

Or when her daughter tells her to retire and let “someone else do it” and she replies, “I never knew such a thing. I did everything that was needed to be done by myself and never regretted it.”  

One of the most poignant scenes in the film is when she and the wife of the owner of a café dance together behind closed doors, one celebrating her loneliness and the other celebrating her life. 

They stop, amidst peals of laughter, when they see men peering at them perplexedly through the windows of the café.

Ironically, as she sits in a museum waiting for the director who is her friend, she realises that she is a museum piece too. A young girl visiting the museum, sees her photograph on the wall and asks if Comrade Petrukhina is still alive.  There is subtle humour in that scene - a few minutes earlier, she had been asked by an attendant to move, as she was sitting on an exhibit.

The film ends with Nadhezdha going back to the aerodrome, and hoisting herself with some effort into the cockpit of a plane there. She feels alive again as she looks at the controls and holds them. All the more so, when the students (and her old comrades) come back from their training and ask her to keep her seat in the cockpit while they grab the wings and run the plane towards the hangar. For a moment as the plane begins to move and pick up speed, she feels like she is flying again... 

 ...until a bump on the head brings her back to earth. And they stop, the men, just before they enter the hangar, and Nadhezdha switches on the engine.  

Maya Bulgakova's performance as Nadhezdha is excellent and the supporting cast members are no less. I was quite amazed to discover that this was Larisa Shepitko’s first film as director after graduating from the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography.  Her first  film, Heat, made as a student for her diploma had already won an award. But for a young woman, only 22, on the cusp of creating her career,  to make a film on a woman who has watched her dream die, seems very difficult. But I found the film wonderful - the subtle shades to the characters, the grey landscape of post-war Industrial Soviet Union, the search for the synonym for 'initiative' by an individual where the collective ruled... The music in the film moved with ease from Mozart and Rachmaninoff, to jazz and poetry. It is sad to think that Shepitko was killed in a car accident after making only four films.

At the end of the film, I was reminded of these lines from the French writer and aviator Antoine de St.Exupery's novel Vol de nuit (Night Flight).

“A thousand dark arms had relinquished their grip on him. His bonds had been loosened, like those of a prisoner allowed to walk for a while alone among the flowers.

‘Too beautiful,’ thought Fabien. He was wandering through a dense treasure-hoard of stars, in a world where nothing, absolutely nothing else but he, Fabien, and his companion, were alive. Similar to those thieves of fabled cities, immured within the treasure chambers from which there is no escape. Amid the frozen gems they wander, infinitely rich yet doomed.”