Irony of Fate has a simple plot that is constantly mentioned throughout the film. Zhenya from Moscow goes to the bathhouse with his buddies every year and this year they drink to the marriage of Zhenya to his girl, Galya. Unfortunately they all get so drunk that forget who was suppose to get on a plane to Leningrad and poor Zhenya is sent off to Leningrad in place of his pal, Pavil. Upon arriving in the airport, Zhenya has no idea that he has just been on a plane ride to Leningrad and gets into a taxi to go home. Strangely enough, there is a 25 Third Builders' Street apartment and he lets himself in, undresses, and falls asleep on the same style bed that he has in his apartment back in Moscow. Nadya, the owner of the apartment, comes home and does not realize a strange man is sleeping in her bed until she has already started readying herself for her date that night for the New Year. When she finds him she beats on him, tugs on him and finally pours a pot of water on his face. Then her date, Ippolit, shows up and believes that Nadya is cheating on him.
Talk about bad timing on the part of Zhenya. I felt sorry for him. He drank with his buddies even though he normally never drinks, they throw him on a plane and he is so confused that he does not realize what is happening to him. His character is comical but in a sense that most Americans are not use to. At the same time you laugh at him you also pity him for his bad luck. In some sense though most people can relate to Zhenya. At some point in life you end up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Although many are not as lucky as him in coming into an apartment of an understanding and beautiful woman.
The comical aspect of this film seems more serious than the comedies we are accustomed to here in the United States. Did anyone else get that feeling? It was as if the writers were trying to say that this could happen to someone if they did not pay attention to what was around them. The introduction cartoon may have had something to do with it. The takeover of the identical white apartment buildings was portrayed as being terrifying. Then the voiceover on the movie said that every town had the same names for the streets. They also joked about how their ancestors who had tried coming up with different designs for buildings. They saw it as silly.
Although the story was quite predictable, everyone knew that Nadya and Zhenya would get together in the end, it was very comical. And there were several different types of shots that most have rarely if ever seen. The parts with the either Zhenya or Nadya playing guitar were different from shots that I have seen in other movies. The songs did tell stories about their lives though. I found that some of the lyrics pertained to exactly what was happening to them. The others I believed to have been from their past. The music was used to tell about the characters without them telling it themselves.
Overall, a very good movie.
1 comment:
And the lyrics of the songs Zhenya and Nadya sing are poems written by some of Russia's very finest poets of the 20th century (Bela Akhmadulina, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak and Yevgeny Yevtushenko). The fact that both the tunes and the words are of such an intense high quality (imho, of course) adds to the uniqueness of the film--putting it somewhere between a melodrama and a musical (but seeming to differ strongly from both). Don't you almost have to wonder whether the two characters court each other (and perhaps even fall in love with each other) through their music--a medium which the hapless (and talentless) Ippolit can't compete in?
Post a Comment