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| Images courtesy of Mosfilm |
Soviet Russian writer-director-actor Eldar Ryazanov was
already a well-established and accomplished theatrical feature filmmaker and
master of the tragicomedy going back to the 1950s with collaborations on
documentaries before mounting his own theatrical feature in 1956’s Carnival
Night. Embarking on his somber
masterpiece Beware of the Car a decade later, Ryanazov’s films tended to
satirize the ordinary Soviet lifestyle depicting characters either in over
their heads or landing themselves in ridiculous situations while painting a
broad portrait of Soviet iconography and architecture. Think of Ryazanov as being somewhere between
the Khruschev Thaw brutalism of Marlen Khutsiev and the looney comic absurdist
energies of Leonid Gaidai.
Frequently collaborating with screenwriter Emil Braginsky
who co-wrote several of Ryanazov’s films including Beware of the Car and
Unbelievable Adventures of Italians in Russia, the creative team sought
to adapt Ryazanov’s 1971 stage play Once on New Year’s Eve for the small
television screen rather than theatrical presentation. Divided into two parts running three hours in
total and broadcast on the First Program of Central Television circa 1976 on
the first on January, The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath became not
only one of the most successful TV films in the Soviet Union but in the years
since it has become canonized as a New Year’s Eve holiday classic in Russia and
other post-Soviet states with millions traditionally tuning in to watch it each
year. Further still, it spawned both an
Indian remake in 2015 called I Love NY and an American remake in 2022
called About Fate starring Emma Roberts and Thomas Mann.
Usually abbreviated to The Irony of Fate minus the subtitle,
the film opens with a snarky animated intro created by Dima Sets Out on a
Journey director Vitaly Peskov on the inception and distribution of
standard residential building designs before centering on Zhenya Lukashin
(Andrey Myagkov). Engaged to be married
to Galya (Olga Naumenko), he celebrates the happy occasion with some friends
getting intoxicated at a local banya (public sauna) including with his friend
Pavlik (Aleksandr Shirvindt) who is on his way to catch a flight to Leningrad. However, by the time the group hits the
airport with both the film’s hero Zhenya and his friend Pavlik passed out drunk
they’ve forgotten who is supposed to travel so they mistakenly board Zhenya
instead, setting in motion a series of screwball and tragicomic events
involving mistaken identity, jealousies and finding true love and romance in
the unlikeliest of places.
Still woozy and inebriated, Zhenya lands in Leningrad so
drunk he thinks he’s still in Moscow and after boarding a taxicab he is driven
to what he believes to be his home address and apartment building when in fact
it belongs to a young woman named Nadya Shevelyova (Barbara Brylska) engaged to
be married to Ippolit (Yuri Yakovlev).
Crashing on the woman’s bed thinking it to be his own, she comes home to
find him passed out and unresponsive, occasionally making boozed up murmurs. To
make matters worse, Ippolit shows up on the two unannounced as she’s trying to
drag him out of her bed and understandably furious storms out despite their
explanations of mistaken identity and mixing properties up. When Zhenya is finally sober enough to
realize the pickle he’s gotten himself in, he unsuccessfully calls his fiancé Galya
back in Moscow who angrily hangs up the phone on him. Nadya is determined to kick Zhenya out and
buys him a train ticket back to Moscow.
However, with both characters’ respective fiancés on the fence now over
the situation, Zhenya promptly tears the ticket up and the two decide to spend
what’s left of New Year’s Eve together.
A screwball romantic comedy of errors, alcoholism and mistaken
identity, time and place that gradually turns into a melancholic romantic
tragicomedy involving characters finding love through intrusive heartbreak, The
Irony of Fate is something of an unclassifiable genre hybrid functioning as
satire, melodrama, social criticism and even character study. Aided by a fairy-tale-like score by Georgiy
Garanyan and soundtrack by Mikael Tariverdiev including songs performed by
Sergey Nikitin and legendary singer Alla Pugacheva and lensed modestly with
grace and occasional scope by A Little Doll cinematographer Vladimir
Nakhabtsev, the televised two-parter looks and sounds lovely while still
adhering to the conventions (and perhaps limitations) of the television
production. Feeling at times less like a
theatrical feature and more like filmed live theater shown on the small screen,
The Irony of Fate for being largely insular due to the freezing cold
winter setting is perhaps best remembered for its iconography of tall Soviet
apartment buildings in the middle of below zero New Year’s Eve weather.
In terms of performances, the film is driven by the comic
and dramatic weathers of the two leads with Andrey Myagkov of Office Romance
making the beleaguered sap into a sympathetic fool locked into an
engagement neither he nor his fiancée feel strongly about while Polish actress
Barbara Brylska of Pharaoh imbues Nadya with fire and heart as an
ordinary woman in an equally impossible scenario. Yuriy Yakovlev as the jealous fiancée to
Nadya is perhaps the most accomplished actor of this saga, having played the
titular Ivan Vasilyevich Changes His Profession as well as Kin-dza-dza!
years later, having worked for both Leonid Gaidai and Georgiy Daneliya. Again however, the film’s real characters are
the chilly Soviet apartment complexes seen from afar as hard unforgiving winter
weather endlessly rains down on them while tiny humans bundle up inside
them. It remains one of the coldest
vistas in cinema history, even in a post-Everest or Aquarela frozen
empire.
Shown on Programme One to an eagerly awaiting viewership of
over 100 million in 1976, the immense unprecedented popularity of Eldar Ryazanov’s
184-minute The Irony of Fate resulted in a re-run of the show a month
later due to popular demand. In the
summer of that year, a slightly shortened 155-minute version was prepared for
theatrical release which further proceeded to sell around 7 million tickets and
by the time 1978 rolled around, viewership was estimated to be around 250
million. Further still, readership of
the official publication of the State Committee for Cinematography voted The
Irony of Fate as the Best Film of the Year and Andrey Myagkov as Best Actor
and all the principal actors and crew members were unanimously awarded the USSR
State Prize in recognition of their creation of the film.
While the film was enjoyed by many, it wasn’t (and still isn’t)
without its subset of controversies stemming from what was considered to be an
anti-Soviet slant pointing at ‘unattractive features’ within the country while
also heralding alcoholism as a winning plot point as the crux of the story
hinges on the film’s hero getting blackout drunk. The film is also currently banned in Ukraine
following an incident in 2015 when one of the film’s supporting actresses Valentina
Talyzina was banned from entering the country.
Then around 2006, Channel One created the musical short film The
First Fast followed by a mini-sequel of sorts to The Irony of Fate. To that end, in 2007 the Russian Federation’s
very own Michael Bay known as Timur Bekmambetov saw fit to direct the
critically maligned but commercially successful The Irony of Fate 2
which plays like a repeat of the first film involving the heroes’ children
getting into a similar predicament and others believe the ongoing tradition of
watching/consuming/digesting The Irony of Fate to be a forced cultural
tradition rather than a natural one.
Whatever the case, wherever the controversies lie, whatever
your feelings are on the film’s worldview (or abdication of responsibility for
some), Eldar Ryazanov’s brief foray into the television world nevertheless
became one of the Soviet Union’s biggest and most profitable commercial
enterprises in the history of the country’s film media empire. At once silly and ultimately kind of sad,
whimsical yet wise and intimate with a sense of vastness overarching
everything, The Irony of Fate like it or not is here to stay and clearly
has made its presence known in Western media as well with Russian Naughty
Grandma director Maryus Vaysberg’s About Fate starring Emma Roberts
and Thomas Mann rewritten for American screens by Tiffany Paulsen. Maybe the most famous Soviet TV film of all
time whose ongoing beloved popularity as a New Year’s favorite echoes that of
American television’s annual obsessions with It’s a Wonderful Life and A
Christmas Story.
--Andrew Kotwicki
