• The Irony of Fate (or Enjoy Your Bath)

1/2/24 (Tues)

This two-part Soviet television film of 1976 reportedly proved an instant success, playing to an estimated 100 million viewers, and has since become a beloved New Year’s Eve ritual all around the ex-Soviet world, many of its lines and routines instantly recognizable to Russian speakers. It’s been likened to a Russian It’s a Wonderful Life, though I’ve also seen comparisons to Annie Hall since the characters are members of the intelligentsia (the leads are a surgeon and schoolteacher) rather than common laborers. I’d never heard of it until a few days earlier but was intrigued by the premise. I found Part 1 easily on YouTube.

Zhenya is going to propose to his girlfriend at a dinner for two at his Moscow apartment that night. He goes off with his friends to celebrate in the bathhouse, where he ends up getting plastered. They go to the airport to see off one equally inebriated friend who is going to Leningrad, but Zhenya mistakenly ends up on the plane instead. When he arrives, he is carried off the plane (in a cameo by director Eldar Ryazanov) and dumped in a chair. He wakes thinking he is still in Moscow and grabs a taxi to his address. Due to the numbing sameness of Russian housing complexes and city layouts, he is taken to an apartment of precisely the same address – and in a droll comment on Soviet times, even the key fits. He promptly goes in, removes his pants, and passes out on the bed. Then the actual resident Nadya returns ahead of a tête-à-tête with her soon-to-arrive fiancé. Shocked to find a man in her bed, she pours water on him to awaken him and tries to get rid of him, but he remains convinced that this is his own apartment and instead asks her to leave. In the midst of this, her fiancé arrives…

The story has the makings of a good screwball comedy, but gets tripped up in too many implausible coincidences. Even accepting as poetic license that the protagonist could have boarded the plane in the first place in that state and on someone else’s ticket (which would have required a passport at the time even for domestic travel) and remained in a stupor throughout the entire boarding and deplaning process, it just isn’t credible to think that this could have lasted through a cab ride and into the woman’s apartment. Given the parody on the impersonal Soviet town planning, the joke would have been fine even if he had been sober and just exhausted from the flight. The woman’s reaction to an intruder in her home was also unrealistic, and the dialogue between them was dumb, at least as subtitled. There were some funny sequences, like the phone calls from the man’s girlfriend (which the woman picked up) and the woman’s fiancé (which the man picked up), but these were few and far between. As with so many wacky would-be comedies of this type, the writers are too intent on the machinery of the farce to pay proper attention to human behavior. It became tiresome. Also, the pace is far too slow for this type of comedy, maybe because it had to be stretched out to fill the 90-minute television slot. The direction needs tightening badly.

One positive element was the music. Both the male and female protagonists grab a guitar and croon at some point, and the songs are not only beautifully rendered but unusually lyrical (at least one is a Pasternak poem set to music). I would love to have the soundtrack, which is reportedly a best-seller.

This film ends with someone ringing the doorbell, a nice setup for the film’s second half. I just wasn’t up for another 90 minutes of this silliness. A good film lies in there somewhere, but this isn’t it.