User Reviews

No doubt KRYLYA is the finest film ever made by a woman, by the greatest woman director of all time - Larisa Shepitko. Its only real competition might be Shepitko's THE ASSENT.

KRYLYA may be the better picture because the subject is much smaller and self contained, like a little diamond every facet tirelessly polished, glittering and reflecting. It is the precision, of the rendering of a personality, and the storytelling which is so impressive. Nothing extraneous, not one wasted minute. The story is an in depth portrait of a woman, Nadezhda Petrukhina, Hero of the Soviet Union, delegate to the city's soviet and a high school principal, as well as a judge of the local talent contest. In the course of the film she takes on and performs a variety of other tasks, including a last minute substitution for a love sick girl as a giant matryoshka doll at a dance performance.

She is a driven, perpetual motion machine. It is one of the miracles of this film that, having now seen it three or four times, each viewing reveals scenes to me which I've misremembered or which didn't exist at all. I seem to have remembered a six hour film and not a 90 minute one. At one point Petrukhina goes to the apartment of a troubled student who she has threatened to expel and who has run away. I've always remembered the disorganized interior of the apartment, liquor and beer bottles scattered, etc. In fact she never enters the apartment, an old lady, with a lame excuse, keeps the door on its chain as she speaks through a crack in the door. The illusion of having seen the inside is accomplished by having the old woman misunderstand Petrukhina, thinking she was looking for the older brother who was in prison, and mentioning that the younger brother ran away because his father beat him.

Really this film is rather spare with the details yet they expand fulsomely in one's memory, truly a film which has more than meets the eye. When introduced, Petrukhna is seen buying a new suit. The salesman, in passing, notes that the material she has selected is the same as the curtains hung over the dressing cubical's thresholds. She is measured by the numbers ("A standard size...") and the cut of her suit is unflatteringly severe in the extreme. She has a dead butch haircut with steely gray highlights. She is a formidable presence who somewhat frightens those of less determined character. She is non-stop brusk even when she takes the time to forcibly instill cheerfulness into a social situation.

Besides coping with the social problems of her hormonally challenged students, her step daughter is marring a much older man. This man is in his mid-thirties and once divorced, yet he is not quite of Petrukhina's generation, the generation which fought the war and sacrificed everything. She tries to act celebratory but her daughter's circle of friends are quite uneasy in her presence. Later, during a discussion with her daughter, who wants her to retire, Petrukhina wants to know who would do her job? "Let somebody else do it." which are words which go through her like a knife. "I never knew those words" she says.

She is quite a solitary figure and even though she is going from one honor to the other she is growing ever more isolated and even feeling lonely. She spends a day walking through town trying to relax. It beings to rain but she is so repressed the rain on her face has no effect. At least not on the surface but we flash back to being caught in the rain with her lover. They are in a military hospital recovering from wounds received on the front. They are both fighter pilots who trained together and now have been re-united. He is hero enough to get transferred to her unit. Then there is the day, when, after shooting down a German fighter plane, he is hit by flak. As his plane descends in a deadly diagonal trailing a straight line of smoke, her plane circles, helplessly, like a mother elephant trying to somehow stave off the already arrived death of her child by making it stand up. Her pleading and unanswered voice shrilly cries out the name of her lover without a flicker of a response. The plane crashes into the earth. She flies over the scattered burning pieces of the wreckage. This is what is at her core. Everything since then has been purely duty.

She has some kind of relationship with the director of the local Natural History Museum. While going through the museum she hears a lecture about famous people from the area and she hears the story of her lover who shot down 17 planes and was a Hero of the Soviet Union and then her name, 12 planes, and Hero of the Soviet Union. One child asks if they were still alive. She realizes that she has become, literally, a museum exhibit. She impulsively asks the museum director to marry her and then leaves without an answer.

She goes out to the airfield to see another friend and sees an acrobatic training aircraft unattended. She struggles to climb up on its wing but makes it to the cockpit. She sits dreamily for a while when the students find her and decide to give her a treat by pushing her around while she sits there.

In a scene which transcends the figurative and the literal, she sees the gaping black maws of the hanger approaching ever closer. She is on the last lap of life. She switches the engine on and taxis away, students giving up the chase, and then she launches the plane into the air, the actual release from earth's bounds profoundly liberating as the plane climbs ever higher into the sky until it disappears as she watches planet earth pass by her far below.