Wings

[osprey_archer]

I’ve been meaning to do a month about Soviet women directors for a while, and I’ve finally tracked down enough movies that are available in the US to make it worthwhile.

I started with Larisa Shepitko’s 1966 Wings, a precursor to her most famous movie The Ascent, which I also intend to watch. Wings reminded me of Agnes Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7, another slow-moving black-and-white movie with a mere wisp of a plot that is mostly a character study of the heroine and an exploration of her world.

Petrukhina, the heroine, is a school principal and general local bigwig who is nonetheless dissatisfied with her life: she often looks back on her days as a pilot during World War II, remembering not so much the fear and excitement of combat as the enchanting freedom of the skies.

This sounds like a set-up for a movie about a middle-aged woman throwing off the shackles of respectability and finding herself, and in some ways it is: over the course of the movie Petrukhina haunts the airfield, quits her job as school principal, asks a museum curator to marry her (he’s clearly been courting her for years so I’m not sure why he doesn’t jump at the chance, but maybe he’s not sure she really means it).

But at the same time, these plot developments seem almost beside the point, practically afterthoughts: there’s no big scene where Petrukhina quits, just an aside later on when she mentions it to someone else. The focus is not on her journey, but on her sense of malaise. There are moments when you can almost see her thinking: this is what we fought for? Boredom?

Comments

[asakiyume]

I was about to muse on whether that's a common question in the minds of people who've done a whole lot for a great cause, after the cause has been achieved--but then I decided, no, actually... I think it's down to the specifics of the cause and the person. Many people are profoundly grateful to have achieved their aims and don't feel bored in the least.

Still, even for those people, the freaky contrast between the past and the present probably gets to them in some form or other.

[osprey_archer]

I feel like a lot of causes are less clear-cut than winning a war, anyway. With a war, there's often a pretty definite end date, whereas if you're fighting more generally for social justice... there are milestones but it's not like there's a definitive moment where you've Won and can now rest on your laurels.

But then again people often step back their involvement when one of those milestones is hit, and maybe they look back later and feel wistful for the intensity of the cause, which their current life may not have?

[maplemood]

We watched this in my Russian lit class this semester! It's really lovely; the ending scene especially got to me.

[osprey_archer]

Yes! It's the perfect and inevitable ending, and yet completely unexpected, too.

I do worry a little what's going to happen once she lands, but hopefully everyone will just agree to not say anything about it and no one will get in trouble.