Carnival Night

A house of culture is preparing its New Year's Eve programme. The newly appointed director, Ogurtsov, takes the programme under review and wants to convert entertainment into seriousness: classical instead of jazz, statements instead of jokes, sessions instead of dancing. The young staff try to save the show under his nose. Eldar Ryazanov directs, in his first feature. Lyudmila Gurchenko plays Lena Krylova and Igor Ilyinsky plays Ogurtsov. The target is explicit: the bureaucrat is drawn as a man administering culture while understanding nothing about it. In 1956, at the start of the post Stalin thaw, building a comedy on that figure was new, and the film carries the air of that moment. It was the most watched film in the Soviet Union that year, with admissions above forty eight million. Gurchenko became a star overnight, and the song she sings, Five Minutes, became a fixed part of Soviet and then Russian New Year tradition. It is played on the same night every year. Ryazanov spent the next thirty years making comedies in the same vein, and this is where that career starts. Who it is for: viewers curious about Soviet comedy and satire of bureaucracy. Who it is not for: the structure is a revue. The narrative is cut constantly by musical numbers and sketches, and the plot is very thin.