★★★
“Flying tonight…”
This week, we’ve been focusing on Soviet military heroines of World War II, and as well as Spies, I also found this Russian TV series, about the female biplane pilots, known to the Germans as the “Night Witches”. Here, their name has been changed for the series title – a tad unfortunately, in some regards – and this falls short of Spies in terms of emotional wallop and overall coherence, among other angles. It’s still worth a look though.
The two lead characters are Galya Shevchenko (Nilova) and Zhenya Zvonareva (Arntgolts), members of the 46th Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment, founded to take advantage of an untapped resource of women pilots, navigators and engineers. Except, the former has been grounded after going off-book and bombing a German convoy for reasons more personal than military. It takes intervention by legendary flier and regiment founder Marina Raskova for Galya to dodge a court-martial, and that sets the tone, with Galya the wild-card, working with the more restrained Zhenya, under their long-suffering commanding officer.
It seems the makers didn’t think the straightforward bombing missions would generate sufficient drama to propel the series, and I can see how that might be a little limited in scope. They tack on various other plots, such as the efforts by their CO’s assistant to get the women in trouble – it’s a bit more gender mixed than the real 46th. The main thread is their work in support of an undercover team, operating behind German lines, run by Alexander Makeev (Nikiforov). For example, the regiment provide air cover for a raid on a convoy carrying important military documents, or a mission to recover technology from a downed plane – the latter, also used in Spies. [Sidenote: I always thought night vision wasn’t invented until, maybe, Vietnam. But the series has it used by the Germans in WW2, and Wikipedia confirms this]
This approach does make it somewhat fragmented; there’s less flow, and also less sense of character development, than Spies managed. Must say though, it’s all rather too glamorous to be convincing: the four lead actresses all appear to have arrived straight out of Supermodel Flight School. It almost feels as if the Soviet Air Force recruited mostly from Robert Palmer’s backing dancers [Kids! Ask your parents!]; in reality, flying ability was valued over how good you looked doing it, and the regiment covered the full spectrum of attractiveness. The horrors of life during wartime here are largely limited to some cute smudges of grease now and again, rather than the reality of life described by one pilot: “We were filthy, exhausted and hungry. We were just trying to survive.”
If you don’t get much feeling of the women being part of a larger battle – in part because there’s no updates on the ebb and flow of the war elsewhere – the individual episodes are generally fine. The best is probably one where the regiment and Makeev’s team have to infiltrate a German chemical weapons testing ground, which is using Russian civilians as the subjects. It’s chilling, and reminded me a little of a similar element in Wonder Woman. Speaking of chilly, the bleak, snow-covered landscapes are a fittingly frosty backdrop, against which the cold-hearted conflict of the Eastern front can unfold, and the cinematography is effective, making the most of the landscapes. However, the flight aspects are a bit up and down: some scenes work very well, yet others are obviously composites and/or shaky CGI.
I’d perhaps have been more impressed if I’d seen this before Spies, which set the bar really high in terms of quality. Compared to that, this is a little disappointing, if decent enough. While other attempts to tell the Night Witches story have foundered, I’m simply pleased to see anything that covers the topic, even with room for improvement. The entire 8-episode series is available on YouTube, with English subs, so you can give it a shot easily enough.
Dir: Mikhail Kabanov
Star: Tatyana Arntgolts, Elizaveta Nilova, Denis Nikiforov, Evgeniy Ganelin
a.k.a. Ночные ласточки and Nochnye lastochki
