A New Year reserved for famous films

As their perception has been freed from the influence of ideology, Russians just watch and enjoy, while wondering what life was like in the Soviet Union.The Irony of Fate was produced by famous film director Eldar Ryazanov in 1975. Because of its dominating drinking theme, the film nearly escaped a ban by the Soviet government.

Former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev tried to ban the film as part of his anti-alcohol campaign when he came to power in 1985. However, the government later changed its mind and allowed it to be screened without the drinking scene in the sauna.

Apart from the vodka theme, the most humorous aspect of the film is its criticism of everyday realities under the Soviet regime, when like the rest of the Soviet people, the film’s characters live in different cities with the same name of street, same numbers of apartment buildings and their flats, with the doors opened by the same interchangeable keys. In short, people living the same interchangeable lives.

In the film an inebriated surgeon, Zhenya (actor Andrei Myagkov), finds himself in a flat similar to his own surrounded by his own furniture and with his own New Year tree. Until the real owner of the flat, Nadya (actress Barbara Brylska) returns home to find to her utter amazement a half-naked tipsy man in her bed. Nadya finally succeeds in convincing her guest that although he is at the correct address he is in the wrong city. The story ends with Nadya and Zhenya falling in love and living happily after.

Yuri Yakovlev in the role of Ippolit, Nadya’s uncontrollably jealous boyfriend, presents a terrific cast.

“The film is available in the market but I will not buy it because I along with my family members see it once a year on television on December 31,’ said Svetlana, a physician, “Now I can’t imagine New Year without it.”Unlike The Irony of Fate, Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears has nothing to do with New Year’s.

But its fairy-tale theme with a feminist angle and the passion it generates in audiences justifies its screening every New Year Eve.

A bitter-sweet comedy about three women who came to Moscow during the 1950s to seek work and love won film director Vladimir Menshov an Oscar in 1980 and the popularity of millions of viewers throughout the Soviet Union.

Besides a melodramatic plot, the film is memorable for its portrayal of Moscow in the 1950s, when unknown poets read their poems in public. “Even though I have watched it umpteen times, every time on the eve of New Year I see it. There is something that makes me to sit near the television and watch the film, said Tatyana Ivanovna, a school teacher.

The musical Carnival Night is another famous Soviet-era blockbuster that Russians associate with New Year, simply because it was this 1956 comedy that actually commenced the tradition of New Year’s movie-watching in Russia.It was the first comedy free of propaganda.