Translated material
Brave people
The public is preparing for the appearance of a sequel to the famous film
Late last night at the Eldar cinema there was a closed premiere of the film “The Irony of Fate. Continuation". The creators of the sequel to the famous Soviet film did not position this event as a premiere and called it “handing over the work to Eldar Ryazanov.” Tomorrow the second “Irony” will appear not only in all cinemas, but also in almost all the halls of the country. It seems that the new “Irony” will not have an official big premiere (similar to the one that “Day Watch” had): “We need to change formats,” co-producer of the project Anatoly Maksimov explained to the Vremya Novostei correspondent. “Otherwise it will become uninteresting.”On the eve of the first public screening, Konstantin Ernst, Anatoly Maksimov, the film’s director Timur Bekmambetov and the leading actor Konstantin Khabensky explained to the journalists gathered at Interfax what the directors of “First” are going to do this time to “make it interesting.”
The idea of continuing Ryazanov’s film novella about Leningrader Nadya and Muscovite Zhenya came to Ernst fifteen years ago, that is, around the same time as the idea for “Old Songs about the Main Thing.” The authors of the project perceive Eldar Ryazanov’s film as the main Soviet film song, as “part of the national memory”. It is precisely this quality of the old “Irony” that, according to Ernst’s plan, can help the “new Irony” return to the cinema that part of the public that has not yet come there. According to statistics, only six million Russians were in modernized halls with comfortable chairs and Dolby sound, and there were 28 million potential viewers in the country. It is this majority of 22 million people who are passive in relation to cinema and should raise the question: “What happened?” with Zhenya and Nadya after the final credits?
It took the authors themselves five years to find the answer - this is exactly the time it took to create more than forty versions of the script and turn the last one into a film. The famous prose writer Alexey Slapovsky worked on the script in collaboration with Ernst and Maximov. The film was offered to Timur Bekmambetov - and even before the birth of “Night Watch”.
According to Ernst, both the producers and the director were interested in the challenge itself: after the intense, literally overflowing with characters and special effects of “Watches,” to make a chamber film that respects the classic trinity of place, time, action.
“Unity of Place”, that is, an apartment on Stroiteley Street, which does not exist in St. Petersburg, was built in the filming pavilions of Prague: the Mosfilm pavilions turned out to be occupied, and renting in the capital of the Czech Republic is even somewhat cheaper than at the main Russian studio (the film’s production budget was five million dollars). The rights to the first “Irony” belong to Mosfilm, so formally Ryazanov’s consent to launch the new project was not required, but, as Ernst assures, without such consent the inventors of the project would never have started work.
Filming ended last December, after which the material was tracked for six months, and this fall a third of the film was reshot. Perhaps it was precisely this fact that gave rise to rumors that were gradually creeping around Moscow that “history did not work out.” But the rumors, it seems, did not reach the general public and did not affect their mood in any way - the preliminary sale of tickets brought an unprecedented sum of a million dollars for pre-sales. The number of copies released for the sequel to “Irony” is also record-breaking: 1050 (usually blockbusters are released in the CIS with circulations ranging from 400 to 600 copies). Considering that there are only 1,300 modern cinema halls in the country, such a massive start is amazing: a viewer who will not go anywhere for the New Year holidays and wants to go to the cinema at least once in these ten days, in fact, simply will have no choice. (True, “only” 830 copies are intended for the domestic public, the rest will go to neighboring countries - 118 to Ukraine, 8 to Belarus, 35 to Kazakhstan, 10 to the Baltic countries, one more copy will go to the former Republic of Transcaucasia). Despite the fact that it will cost about a million dollars just to print that many copies, overall the film's release will cost less than it did with The Watch.
And it’s not just a matter of saving - Konstantin Ernst outlined a new “trend”: an advertising campaign, in his opinion, no longer has to be as total, large-scale and thunderous as a couple of years ago. Indeed, as the last year showed, when only three Russian films (“Wolfhound”, “Heat”, “Shadowboxing 2”) made it to the top lines of the domestic box office, neither a city crammed with billboards, nor even a TV advertising onslaught guarantees record fees . According to Ernst, the changed life dictates new conditions of the game in the film advertising market - the viewer already knows that Russian cinema exists and is worthy of attention, which means that they just need to inform him about the availability of this or that product. Campaign “Ironies of Fate. Continuations" will be conducted sottovoce, in a low voice, in the format of an "intimate statement", since - Ernst claims - advertising is needed only to lure the public to the first weekend, and then word of mouth will work.
Whether word of mouth will work for or against the new “Irony”, of course, it’s impossible to guess until you look at the whole picture. That significant fragment that was shown before the press conference made a rather unpleasant impression on me personally - vanity and falsehood.
Zhenya Lukashin's son Kostya (Konstantin Khabensky) ends up in the apartment of Nadya and Ippolit's daughter (she is also Nadya, and she is played by Liza Boyarskaya), disrupting the New Year's efforts of the girl and her fiancé Irakli (Sergei Bezrukov). Khabensky very unnaturally portrays a drunk, Bezrukov talks on his hands free mobile all the time. According to the authors, if the symbol of the country thirty years ago was standard apartments, then the symbol of current Russian life has become mobile communications - an image of false communications. Nadya's lover Irakli (his parents named him in honor of Irakli Andronikov) is a major manager of the Beeline network, which will play an important role in the plot. Khabensky’s hero, as it turned out later, all this time only pretended to be drunk, but in fact was sober - well, and overacted, of course: he is not an artist, but a character. But Khabensky is an artist! And, perhaps, it was his powerful charisma that was to blame for the fact that the falsity emanating from the hero permeated the entire fragment - the characters of Bezrukov and Boyarskaya as well. Why, I wonder, was it necessary to show this particular piece out of context? They are risky people after all, the leaders of First.