(Ironiya sudby, ili S legkim parom!) Nevertheless, many polls have shown that older Russian citizens have much more favorable opinions and views of the late Brezhnev era than of what has come since. Required fields are marked *, You may use these HTML tags and attributes:

. The nostalgia of the Soviet Union is the most disgusting thing that only an animal could experience. We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Lenin was a mushroom: Kuryokhin’s TV mystification, Introducing the Russky London KinoKlub | Obskura. The songs, along with the cinematic score, were written by Mikael Tariverdiev. This is the main plot and the rest of the film plays out in many ways like a typical romantic comedy. It’s a film that always puts me in the holiday spirit, and whether I’m with friends or alone, I always have a great New Year’s Eve watching it, just as many Russian souls have and continue to do so year after year. But this is great soundtrack anyway. The plot of the film is rather straightforward. He became an old man, but he managed to swing it. After viewing product detail pages, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. The Irony of Fate is a love story springing from a coincidence that could have happened only in the USSR, ... and the intro is still portraying very sharply the Russian crazy bureaucracy. Through a very funny dialogue, they incorrectly assume that it is Zhenya that needs to fly to Leningrad and they help him board the plane, despite Zhenya being borderline unconscious from drinking. Quality of sound is bad. Original soundtrack to the 1975 motion picture. Great find and excellent reproduction. Ironiya sudby, ili S lyogkim parom!) The film is always an extension of the festive table. Everyone living in cold, sterile, Spartan apartments provided by the state would also be depressing. Just like it’s hard to remember for modern Westerners that today’s Russia has the best quality of life in all of Russian history, it’s also hard to remember that the previous “kindly emperor golden age”—the two decades of Brezhnev’s rule—were also a period of the best ever quality of life up to then. The USSR will always be a caricature of reality, focused on the things that that ultimately don’t matter (like military parades through Moscow) without acknowledging the things that do…music, art, family, culture, etc. (Ирония судьбы, или С лёгким паром!) But The Irony of Fate owes part of it's immense popularity not just to it's genius director, it's clever comedy, it's satirical subplot or it's starring actors. The traditional formula is intact – boy meets girl, they initially disagree but everything comes good in the end – except that the plot device that engineers their meeting is somewhat unusual. Related Themes: Page Number and Citation: 1.3.135-138 Cite this Quote. Also, Brezhnev’s “kindly emperor golden age” should be an eternal warning to the West today. But let this be a warning to the West, and especially the Anglosphere. Your recently viewed items and featured recommendations, Select the department you want to search in. After a long period of drinking vodka, they realize that one of their friends at the banya with them has a flight to Leningrad (St. Petersburg) that evening. Please try again. If there’s any Soviet film at all that fits in the concept of cult cinema (that is more a product of Western film studies), it is undoubtedly The Irony of Fate. From what I hear, anyway. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. And sometimes, after certain people have managed to destroy every single value, moral, and traditional framework, which served both as a spine and a shield to society and the individual, leaving him powerless and at the mercy of corporate and state brainwashing and manipulation, and any local or foreign predator—to build another spine and another shield, you’ll have to use everything you can get. Many citizens were also censored and imprisoned through Brezhnev’s crackdown on dissent, led by then-KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading. Related Characters: Banquo (speaker), Macbeth, Weird Sisters. Apart from provoking repetitive viewings, the film perfectly complies with Umberto Eco’s claims on cult film (see Umberto Eco, ‘Casablanca: Cult movies and intertextual collage‘). Having seen it on TV year after year, even younger generations of Russians know most of these songs by heart. Partly because of the way it is written (the film has three epigraphs and two finales), partly due to the nature of television broadcasting, The Irony of Fate became “a disconnected series of images, of peaks, of visual icebergs”, which, according to Eco, is essential for transforming a text into a cult object. Comments are moderated. This is because the director of The Irony of Fate, Elder Ryazanov, based the film on a play he had written in 1971 called Once On New Year’s Eve. But The Irony of Fate owes part of it's immense popularity not just to it's genius director, it's clever comedy, it's satirical subplot or it's starring actors. It was mostly bad. Even now, as I write these lines, I hear the film on the background. DVD DILOGY Ironija Sudby, Ili s Legkim Parom! To put it simply, the Soviet Union’s economy slowed down in the 1970s, and to counter the apparent signs of economic decline, Brezhnev attempted to improve living standards through housing and social benefits. that Andrey Myagkov? Despite its length (180 minutes broken into two 90-minute episodes), it became an instant hit and has been played on television every New Year’s Eve in Russia and other former Soviet states for the last 40 years. While we get the sense that Galya disapproves of both his friends and their yearly ritual, the film follows Zhenya as he meets and gets drunk with his friends at the banya. It may look like you’re in your best years, and the system will work forever—like it did for the USSR in its golden decades—but sometimes below the surface everything has been hollowed out by cynical special interest groups, and a simple sneeze is all it takes to collapse the whole house of cards. In my opinion, the film’s music score could easily have competed with some of the Oscar-winning musical scores of Hollywood during that same period. Neither of us is from the post-Soviet space, but the film is simply the best choice for a NY traditional evening at home. Also I’d recommend ‘White Sun of the Desert’, ‘Gentlemen of Fortune’, and ‘The Diamond Arm’, from the vintage golden age Soviet films. ?? Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.