The Irony of Fate (1976) poster
1976 · comedy · romance

The Irony of Fate

Directed by Eldar Ryazanov3h 12m1976
ElsewhereIMDb8.114kTMDB7.3266
  • warm
  • tender
  • intimate
Movie DNA

Warm, steady, gentle comedy / romance, grounded in texture. Ambivalent, intimate, tender, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.

How every film is hand-scored →

A group of old friends have a tradition of going to a public bathing house on New Year's Eve. Occasionally too much vodka and beer makes two of them unconscious. The problem is that one of them (Sasha) has to go to Leningrad but another one (Zhenya) goes. Zhenya wakes up at Leningrad airport. Believing that he is still in Moscow he takes a taxi and goes home. The street name, building and even apartment number, the way an apartment complex looks the same and the key coincide completely - just typical Soviet-type 'economy' architecture. Imagine the surprise of Nadya when she enters her apartment and finds a man without trousers in her bed. What's more - Nadya's fiancé also finds him there...

Our read · The Irony of Fate (1976) reads as a warm, steady, grounded comedy · romance entry — gentle in intensity, intimate in scope, tender in temperature, ambivalent in outlook. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.

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The shape of The Irony of Fate

Tonight, this looks like

What watching it is actually like.

You want the quintessential Soviet New Year's rom-com marathon with mistaken identity.

ends warmyou’ll feel glowing aftera slow buildgrips by minute 35attention 3/5feels its lengthsubtitles: full
Date nightWith friendsSoloWith parentsKids around

Skip it tonightSkip if three-hour subtitled holiday dramedy feels impossible tonight.

DNA · twelve axes

The reading.

Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.

Mood · HeavyCosy
Pacing · Slow-burnKinetic
Intensity · GentleExtreme
Weirdness · ConventionalSurreal
Hope · NihilisticRedemptive
Stakes · IntimateEpic
Humour · NoneBroad
Reality · GroundedFantastical
Density · SparseTwisty
Warmth · ColdTender
Auteur · TransparentSignature
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