Russians Flock to Learn Fate of Zhenya and Nadya

MOSCOW -- Much like Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life" in American culture, the Soviet film "The Irony of Fate" has a permanent home in Russian hearts -- and on TV screens every holiday season.

The 1975 film, directed by Eldar Ryazanov, is a sweet, witty romance that also took a sly shot at homogenization in Soviet life. After a bender with his buddies, a Moscow doctor named Zhenya sobers up in the Leningrad airport, unaware that he has flown to that city. He takes a taxi through streets exactly like those at home to an apartment block exactly like his and even opens the door to what he believes is his fourth-floor flat with his key from Moscow.

The oblivious Zhenya falls into bed.

The apartment in fact belongs to an attractive blonde named Nadya, a woman not entirely happy with her puffed-up bureaucrat boyfriend and searching for something truer in life and love. She and Zhenya, the slightly hapless hero, strike up a romance. But the film, which airs every New Year's Eve on Russian television, ends without revealing the couple's ultimate fate.

Now the suspense is over. "The Irony of Fate: Continuation" opened in Russian theaters Dec. 21.

"For people who were born in the territory of the former Soviet Union, 'The Irony of Fate' is not actually a film -- it is part of their national memory," Konstantin Ernst, one of the new film's producers, said at a news conference this month.

Retouching a classic is a risky business. And perhaps unsurprisingly, a film whose makers insist is not a sequel has met with derision from Moscow film critics.

"The second 'Irony' differs from the first one as much as the rotten, dank weather outside differs from a frosty, fresh December with powdery snow," Yelena Yampolskaya wrote in the newspaper Izvestia.

The bad reviews had no effect on curious moviegoers, who showed up in droves. The box office take was $9 million the first weekend, making the film a blockbuster by Russian standards.

"I liked it because it's so recognizable," Nadezhda Bessonova, a 28-year-old computer specialist, said after seeing the movie this week. "It's also a humane and kind depiction of our current life."

After the first "Irony" faded to black, the new film informs us, Zhenya and Nadya went their separate ways. Nadya stuck with her bureaucrat boyfriend, married him and had a daughter, also called Nadya. Zhenya married and had a son, Konstantin. Both later divorced.

More than 30 years later, Konstantin ends up blind drunk in the original flat, where the younger Nadya finds him. He is there as part of a convoluted ruse by his father's friends to get Zhenya back into the arms of the woman with whom he shared a magical night. The waylaid son is the bait to get Zhenya back to Leningrad, now called St. Petersburg.