The Irony of Fate

The screenplay was written by Emil Braginsky and Ryazanov, loosely based on the director's 1971 play, Once on New Year's Eve (Russian: Однажды в новогоднюю ночь).

As a result, the identical, functional but unimaginative multistory apartment buildings found their way into every city, town, and suburb across the Soviet Union.

The friends all get very drunk toasting the upcoming marriage of the central male character, Zhenya Lukashin (Andrey Myagkov) to Galya (Olga Naumenko).

Zhenya spends the entire flight sleeping on the shoulder of his annoyed seatmate (Eldar Ryazanov in a brief comedic cameo appearance).

In the morning, a drunken Ippolit barges into the apartment and amazes Zhenya and Nadia with his erratic behavior (he takes a shower right in his winter coat and hat) and at the same time logical and close to the truth arguments about what happened on this New Year's Eve.

Initially, Anna German was preparing to perform songs for the film, but the recording did not take place – the funds for the invitation of a foreign singer were not included in the estimate.

[6] All music is composed by Mikael TariverdievThe two consecutive episodes of The Irony of Fate were originally broadcast by the Soviet central television channel, Programme One,[7] on 1 January 1976, at 18:00.

[8] The film was a resounding success with audiences: author Fedor Razzakov recalled that "virtually the entire country watched the show";[9] the number of viewers was estimated to have been about 100 million.

[12] The readers of Sovetskii Ekran, the official publication of the State Committee for Cinematography, voted The Irony of Fate as the best film of 1976, and chose Andrey Myagkov as the best actor of the year.

[13] In 1977, Ryazanov, Braginsky, cinematographer Vladimir Nakhabtsev, composer Mikael Tariverdiev and actors Barbara Brylska and Myagkov were all awarded the USSR State Prize in recognition of their participation in making the film.

[14] Simultaneously, however, critics accused the director of creating an escapist film which allowed the Soviet audience to turn away from the "unattractive features" of their country's reality.

[15] In his book Problems in the Russian House,[b] Sergey Kara-Murza posted a critical article in which he reproached Ryazanov for the "anti-Sovietism" nature of his heroes, as well as for the formation and cultivation of images of "internal emigrants" by him.

In his opinion, the heroes of the film are "typical intelligents of those years with social traits close to this circle," who, however, are well over thirty but they do not have a family and children, while having energetic mothers [almost implausible for a post-war generation] who care about their comfort and material well-being.

The subtle signs of the "far-fetched elitism, aristocracy" of the film's characters were picked up and assimilated by a very significant part of the intelligentsia, who eventually "enthusiastically accepted Perestroika and applauded Sakharov".

[16] In 2019, archdeacon Vladimir Vasilik analyzed several themes of the film – orphanhood and fatherlessness of the Soviet intelligentsia of the Khrushchev-Brezhnev era, love and betrayal, drunkenness, blizzard as an image of Fate and a metaphor of infernal fun for the New Year, – and described the film as "a monument to the era of late socialism with all its greatness and tragedy," which at the same time "carries the reflection of the love fading on earth from people who have experienced God-abandonment."

"[17] The film is widely regarded as a classic piece of Russian popular culture and is traditionally broadcast in Russia and almost all former Soviet republics every New Year's Eve (Andrew Horton and Michael Brashinsky likened its status to that held by Frank Capra's 1946 It's a Wonderful Life in the United States as a holiday staple).