The Irony of Fate, aka Enjoy Your Bath, on DVD. A Russian comedy/drama from 75, made for Russian television and shown on TV there every New Year's Eve since. I can understand why. It's terrific albeit overlong. Well, not really overlong for a -part television film; I was expecting a regular movie of perhaps hours. It's plotted more or less like of those Howard Hawks or George Cukor screwball comedies from the thirties and early forties, but with more seriousness in the mix. It's based on a stage play written by the director, Eldar Ryazanov, and a co-author. Contrary to how stage-to-screen adaptations usually work, the play script was not truncated for the film. It does a thing drama ought to do: you can tell that the characters' lives will continue after the night and morning that you see, and that the choices they must make over that night and morning will affect those lives, and whatever those choices are, some more-or-less sympathetic characters will be hurt by their outcomes. But that's life, and that's serious drama. And damn, the actresses are gorgeous. And they sure can act. Barbara Brylska especially can express a whole range of emotion in her face even though her lines are dubbed by a Russian actress. She's Polish, and her Russian was considered overly accented for a Russian character. Ryazanov talks about that in a recent interview in the DVD extras. This monolingual Anglophone would otherwise have had no idea; the look and sound of her speech seem completely natural. Anyway...recommended; it's on both DVD and YouTube.