Russian ‘Wings’ Underscores Shattered Postwar Dreams

The Monica 4-Plex’s “Russian Women Filmmakers” commenced its Saturday-Sunday 11 a.m. screenings last week with Larissa Shepitko’s “The Ascent” (1976), a Christ allegory set against a harsh winter in German-occupied Byelorussia.

This film is as grueling as it is masterful, and now Shepitko will be represented by her equally impressive but far more inviting “Wings” (1966).

Although both films attest to Shepitko’s virtuoso ease with film narrative, they are very different in tone. Yet ultimately both are so critical of Soviet society that it’s amazing that she got away with such candor. Both are concerned with spiritual longing in a Communist world.

“Wings” star Maya Bulgakova strikes one as a kind of Slavic Glenn Close, distinctive in appearance and formidable in her range as an actress. Like Close, Bulgakova can involve us with difficult, spiky characters without asking us to like them. She’s cast as the principal of a high school in a fine old unnamed city, and soon after we meet her we ever so gradually become aware of how the job is stifling her with its petty details.

She’s the model Soviet woman, conscientious, hard-working, severely dressed, but she often fails to handle people and their problems with the compassion she actually feels for them. Her relationship with her adopted, grown daughter is especially strained, and as she lashes out at her, explaining that her generation “had no choices,” we discover, to our surprise, that this principal once had a radically different kind of life.

If “The Ascent” laments the lack of spirituality in Soviet life, “Wings” suggests a postwar betrayal of life’s promises for many of those who served so courageously in World War II. In any event, this stunning-looking film is illuminated by Bulgakova’s remarkable performance.

Information: (213) 848-3500.

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Exceptional Keaton: Some of the early talkies Buster Keaton made at MGM are almost unbearably painful to watch, since they record both his struggle to adapt to a new medium and with his personal demons.

The most prominent exception to the rule is the 1932 “Speak Easily” (at the Silent Movie Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. along with a program of silent Keaton shorts), an amusing charmer in which Keaton plays a naive classics professor who, believing he’s inherited a fortune, takes off to see the world and winds up backing a Broadway revue for a mediocre--that’s putting it kindly--traveling comedy headed by its comedian-pianist Jimmy Durante.

Although Durante would soon supplant Keaton at Metro, the two strike a much better balance here than they did in the earlier, excruciating “Passionate Plumber.” The ill-fated Thelma Todd is the film’s delectable comic vamp.

Information: (213) 653-2389.