My overall impressions of
Irony of Fate remains about the same as my impressions of the first part. The comedy stems from the issue of mistaken geography, namely that Zhenya lives in Moscow while Nadya lives in Leningrad; if, as the title implies and the end of the film illustrates, their relationship is fated to be, then the identical suburban layouts of Soviet Russia, which from the beginning lines of the film are (however tamely) being prodded at. The film maintains some of the standard comic elements of what would be called romantic comedy in America, wherein the two romantic leads turn loathing into love, while maintaining the somewhat hollow illusion that they will not, in fact, end up together. This then becomes reminiscent of the reading from Kenez where he discusses the trend in early Russian cinema away from happy endings.
Irony of Fate drags a little during the second part where it ditches the comedy in favor of the more dramatic interchanges between Zhenya and Nadya, but seems to return full circle to the type of comedy exemplified early in the film, using Zhenya's friends as the mechanism for a more straightforward comedy, but in doing so it illustrates the major comedic refrains that dominate the film both in dialogue and circumstance.
And now on to something almost completely different...
We can see in the first chapter of Kenez the middle class and democratic tendencies of early Russian films, and although this probably did not constitute a precursor to the socialist revolution, it is possible that the culture of these early films revealed something characteristic about the Russian people. This chapter also shows the sort of international nature of film culture, and although the subject matter may be germane to each individual nation like Russia, film tied all of these individual cultures together through people's desire to watch movies.
p.s. The guy who plays Zhenya looks like the love child of Dana Carvey and Sting.
And it's probably no accident that films, even in the very earliest days of the medium, had an ability to appeal across cultural and national boundaries in a way that often surpassed literature's ability to do so. We might consider over the next couple of days whether the silent nature of early film might have been one of the primary reasons for this phenomenon.
ReplyDeleteApart from the fact that that actor (Andrei Miagkov) is probably old enough to be both Sting's and Dana Carvey's father--I can see where you're coming from! :>)