Apparently this film has been shown every year in Russia for decades, and people there know it by heart. This was my first time seeing it -- without that cultural hyperfamiliarity -- and it was very easy to see why it's so popular -- it's hugely entertaining. It's about three hours long, but hardly felt like an hour.
There's a perfect absurdist farce premise of a man who ends up in an identical prefab apartment with his own at the same address (which also, it has been pointed out, could easily be taken as a comment on the sameness of Soviet architecture of the time). That farce plays out fantastically but then, after the clock has struck 12 on New Year's Eve with our protagonist in the wrong city, we keep following these people and become invested in serious hopelessness of their situations.
In essence, it takes what could be a good basic bedroom farce, arms it with legitimately likable, interesting characters we want to follow, and more or less keeps them in a room overnight. The small cast is a blessing here. It's a winning formula of goofiness crossed with seriousness. The jealous Ippolit, for instance, looks ridiculous showering drunkenly with his clothes on, but when he goes out that way into the freezing night saying that perhaps he wants to catch cold and die the feeling of seriousness dissipates.
Overall, incredibly likable and entertaining. The music is good, and the theme of not boxing life in with rules and accepting happy accidents is welcome. If it's phenomenally popular, I'd say it seems to be rightly so.
There's a perfect absurdist farce premise of a man who ends up in an identical prefab apartment with his own at the same address (which also, it has been pointed out, could easily be taken as a comment on the sameness of Soviet architecture of the time). That farce plays out fantastically but then, after the clock has struck 12 on New Year's Eve with our protagonist in the wrong city, we keep following these people and become invested in serious hopelessness of their situations.
In essence, it takes what could be a good basic bedroom farce, arms it with legitimately likable, interesting characters we want to follow, and more or less keeps them in a room overnight. The small cast is a blessing here. It's a winning formula of goofiness crossed with seriousness. The jealous Ippolit, for instance, looks ridiculous showering drunkenly with his clothes on, but when he goes out that way into the freezing night saying that perhaps he wants to catch cold and die the feeling of seriousness dissipates.
Overall, incredibly likable and entertaining. The music is good, and the theme of not boxing life in with rules and accepting happy accidents is welcome. If it's phenomenally popular, I'd say it seems to be rightly so.