Eldar Ryazanov, celebrated satiric Russian filmmaker, dies at 88
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Version 0 of 1. Eldar Ryazanov, a filmmaker who for more than half a century satirized and romanticized the life of ordinary Russians in his immensely popular comedies, died Nov. 30 at a hospital in Moscow. He was 88. The cause was a heart ailment, according to his family. Russian President Vladimir Putin mourned him as a “real master and creator” whose films have become “true classics of Russian cinema and part of our national heritage, part of the history of our country.” Mr. Ryazanov was a household name in Russia, and his films are arguably the most recognizable titles in Soviet popular culture. His films ridiculed Soviet bureaucracy and lifestyle, but the lightness of his satire helped him dodge communist censorship. Only one of his works was banned by Soviet censors: the 1961 comedy “A Man From Nowhere” about a noble savage from an imaginary primitive tribe who visits the Soviet Union and is amused and shocked by its people and customs. Once compared to U.S. director Billy Wilder for his artistic diversity and longevity, Mr. Ryazanov directed almost 30 films, most of which became box-office hits and spawned countless Russian catchphrases and popular jokes. Most of his films were centered on an improbable or purely fantastic event that turned the boredom of daily life into a vortex of comic escapades with an obligatory happy ending. From the early 1950s, Mr. Ryazanov also wrote scripts and briefly appeared in his films, usually playing unsympathetic strangers whose presence added another ironic dimension to the plot. Years after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, he acknowledged that fear of the government had dominated his life. “Every time I worked (on a film), I had to force a slave out of myself and overcome my fear of Soviet authorities,” Mr. Ryazanov told the Narodnaya Gazeta daily in 2008. His most popular film, the 1975 comedy “The Irony of Fate,” mocked what communist ideologues hailed as the pinnacle of a planned economy — the clusters of identical apartment buildings located on streets with identical names in cities around the country. It follows a dead-drunk surgeon who gets on a plane on New Year’s Eve to what was then Leningrad and makes his way into an apartment whose address, door locks and even furniture are identical to his new residence in Moscow. The real owner is a fair-haired, blue-eyed schoolteacher engaged to a dull bureaucratic type. She finds the intruder on her sofa and helps him realize he is hundreds of miles away from his home. The showing of the film on national television channels on New Year’s Eve has become as big a part of the celebrations as the champagne flutes and Russian salad on family tables, and other films by Mr. Ryazanov are nearly as ubiquitous. Eldar Alexandrovich Ryazanov was born Nov. 18, 1927, in what is now Samara, a city on the Volga River, into the family of a Soviet economist who was imprisoned during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. He gained immediate popularity in the 19590s with his first feature film, “Carnival Night.” His forays into period dramas — such as “The Cruel Romance,” his 1984 film about a 19th-century Russian woman from an impoverished aristocratic family who is shot dead by her jealous fiance — won him critical praise. His films after the Soviet Union’s collapse were less successful and brought mixed reviews. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available. — Associated Press |