Evengyny Thanks for the memories!

Steineded How sad is this?

Executscan Expected more

Bergorks If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

He'e Nalu 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.

atlasmb An early film of famed Russian director Larisa Shepitko, "Wings" is the story of a Nadezhda (Mayya Bulgakova), a former pilot considered a hero of the state. Rewarded for her wartime exploits, she is now the principal of a vocational school. She also holds a largely inconsequential bureaucratic position.Emotionally unfulfilled, she daydreams about flying and dogfights.With a peripatetic plot that is almost "slice of life", "Wings" explores the quotidian details of her life--small emergencies at school, her unsatisfactory relationships with her daughter and with a male friend.The result is an examination of midlife crisis, the transfer of the military lifestyle to civilian life, and a feminist view of job roles in society. Nadezhda seems clueless about the causes of her own dissatisfaction with life. And her students serve as surrogates for military comrades and her own children as she tries to organize her life in a manner she feels is correct.This film lacks a focus that would make it more relevant.

Perception_de_Ambiguity 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.

didi-5 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.