Wings (Larisa Shepitko, 1966)

Wings was the first feature by Larisa Shepitko, who made only four of them before dying in an automobile accident in 1979, only 41. I've now seen two of her films, the other being her last completed one, The Ascent (1977), and it's clear to me how great a loss her death was. That last film was an extraordinary, harrowing adventure with a brilliant documentary realism but also a profound symbolic resonance. Her first is almost a polar opposite: a low-key character study of a woman whose adventures -- she was a decorated pilot during World War II -- are long behind her. Nadezhda Petrukhina (Mayya Bulgakova) now leads a quiet existence as headmistress of a school that prepares students for work in the construction industry. She is admired by her colleagues and students but unfulfilled by her work. She has an adopted daughter, Tanya (Zhanna Bolotova), but they have grown apart: Nadezhda hasn't even met Tanya's new husband, and when she goes to a party where he's present she mistakenly greets the wrong man as her son-in-law. In addition to supervising repairs at the school and coaching the participants in the school's entry in a theatrical contest, she also has to discipline a rebellious young male student -- with whom, we see, she has a kind of sympathy that is stifled by her official duties. She occasionally sees a man, the director of the local museum where her picture as a war hero is on display -- on a visit to the museum she overhears a girl ask if she's still alive. And occasionally she visits the local airfield to watch cadets being trained. We get a flashback to wartime, when she had a lover, Mitya (Leonid Dyachkov), a fellow pilot whose death in combat she witnessed. Flight, that eternal symbol of freedom, is a strong force even in the earthbound life she leads, and we glimpse her fantasies of soaring through the clouds. So at the film's end, having quit her job, she takes a daring move to achieve that freedom once again. Spare but poetic, with a stunning performance by Bulgakova, Wings was written by Valentin Ezhov and Natalya Ryazantseva and filmed by Igor Slabnevich.

Ballad of a Soldier (Grigoriy Chukhray, 1959)

Before the collapse of the Soviet Union there used to be jokes about how Russians claimed to have invented everything from the light bulb to baseball. During a thaw in the Cold War that led to an exchange of films between the Soviets and the Americans, American audiences learned that the Russians had at least improved on a familiar Hollywood genre: the glossy, sentimental wartime romance. Even Hollywood was impressed, giving director Grigoriy Chukhray and his co-screenwriter Valentin Ezhov an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay. Ballad of a Soldier was a substantial hit, thanks in large part to its appealing leads, Vladimir Ivashov and Zhanna Prokhorenko. Ivashov plays Alyosha, a private serving at the Front who single-handedly cripples two German tanks and is rewarded with a leave to return home and see his mother. But it's not easy making it cross-country in Russia during wartime, and he is forced to bribe his way onto a freight car carrying bales of hay. At a stop, he is joined by another stowaway, a young girl named Shura (Prokhorenko). She initially takes fright at discovering she has a traveling companion, but they eventually begin to fall in love, only to face an inevitable separation. The two young leads -- they were both untried actors still in their teens when they were cast -- are touchingly fresh and innocent, making the contrast with the harshness that surrounds them more poignant. It's a road movie as well as a love story, with some fine character bits by people they meet along the way, especially Evgeniy Urbanskiy as a soldier embittered by the loss of a leg and fearful of how he will be received by his wife. Although the core of the film focuses on Alyosha and Shura, their story is framed by some spectacularly filmed battle scenes at the beginning and Alyosha's painfully brief return home at the end, sequences that surround the love story with scenes of urgency. Chukray has a real gift for pacing and rhythm, aided by his editor, Mariya Timofeeva, though he sometimes allows his cinematographers, Vladimir Nikolayev and Era Savalyeva, to indulge in camera tricks: At one point when Alyosha is being pursued by a tank, the camera does a head-over-heels rollover shot that ends with Alyosha and the tank upside-down on the screen, a giddy, gratuitous bit of fancy photography. Ballad of a Soldier certainly didn't break any new ground, but it managed to make its genre clichés feel fresh.