Past Event! Note: this event has already taken place.
Russian Film
November 27, 2013 at 4:00 PM to 7:00 PM
| Location: | 337 St. Patrick's Building |
| Cost: | Free |
Title: The Irony of Fate or Enjoy your Bath
Language(s): Russian with English subtitles
Description: Following their annual tradition, a group of friends meet at a banya (a traditional public bath) in Moscow to celebrate New Year’s Eve (Новогодняя ночь, Novogodnyaya Noch). The friends all get very drunk toasting the upcoming marriage of the central male character, Zhenya Lukashin (Andrei Myagkov) to Galya (Olga Naumenko). After the bath, one of the friends, Pavlik (Aleksandr Shirvindt), has to catch a plane to Leningrad; Zhenya, on the other hand, is supposed to go home to celebrate New Year’s Eve with his fiancée. Both Zhenya and Pavlik pass out. The others cannot remember which of their unconscious friends is supposed to be catching the plane; eventually they mistakenly decide that it is Zhenya and put him on a plane instead of Pavlik. On the plane, he collapses onto the shoulder of his annoyed seatmate, played by the director himself (Ryazanov) in a brief comedic cameo appearance. The seatmate helps Zhenya get off the plane in Leningrad. He wakes up in Leningrad airport, believing he is still in Moscow. He stumbles into a taxi and, still quite drunk, gives the driver his address. It turns out that in Leningrad there is a street with the same name (3rd Builders’ street), with a building at his address which looks exactly like Zhenya’s. The key fits in the door of the apartment with the same number (as alluded to in the introductory narration, “…building standard apartments with standard locks”). Inside, even the furniture is nearly identical to that of Zhenya’s apartment. Zhenya is too drunk to notice the differences, and goes to sleep.