It Can't Be!

Three separate stories. In one, a man learning he is about to be arrested stages a divorce to protect his property, and his wife takes it rather too seriously. In one there is a wedding at which the groom cannot pick his own wife out of the guests and does not know who anyone is. In one a crime story is told and the person telling it keeps changing. The subject is not comedy but how quickly people change roles when their interests require it. Nobody in any of the three parts is honest and nobody minds; the humour comes out of that shared acceptance. The form is close to theatre. The scenes are crowded, the talk overlaps and the characters are drawn as types. Leonid Gaidai's known brand of fast comedy is more verbal and less physical here. The source is the stories of Mikhail Zoshchenko, whose writing targeted the small hypocrisies of Soviet daily life, and the film keeps that register. One of its songs became popular on its own after release and was sung for years. Mikhail Pugovkin, Nina Grebeshkova and Vyacheslav Nevinnyy are in the cast. Who it is for: viewers curious about Soviet comedy and Zoshchenko adaptations. Who it is not for: anyone without the context; some of the jokes require knowing the bureaucracy of the period.