This comedy was adapted from a play by Bulgakov that I've had trouble finding a copy of, so I don't know how much it diverges. The events (present-day ones anyway) must have been brought a few decades into the future, but it certainly preserves Bulgakov's talent for letting that natural results of a silly situation speak for themselves in order to make any point he may be coming to -- in this case a time machine to allow a contemporary stick in the mud neighbor (accompanied by a comic thief) to switch places with Ivan the Terrible.
The bookish, spacey "Shurik" character, who previously appeared in two other films, is inserted, and with his third a pattern is established that each film got more expensive-looking and better made, and less of the story had to do with Shurik each time. Aleksandr Demyanenko is funny again, but the real humor comes from the Tsar and his lookalike.
As one can imagine, farcical situations emerge from the two being unfamiliar with each other's times and social positions, but the jokes themselves don't seem predictable. On the contrary, the whole thing has a huge, infectious sense of fun about it, from the silly opening credits to Miloslavsky's breaking of the fourth wall, to the self-consciously reset ending. It feels like everyone involved decided they gave a damn only about making a fun movie, and the fun is infectious.
I'm only learning Russian now as a second language, so I could tell that there were jokes that arise out of Ivan's use of Slavonic archaisms and Bunsha'a inability to do the same, but I don't think I got all the subtleties that there were there. But didn't stop me from thinking this was one of the funniest and most enjoyable of the Russian comedies which I have been watching lately.
The bookish, spacey "Shurik" character, who previously appeared in two other films, is inserted, and with his third a pattern is established that each film got more expensive-looking and better made, and less of the story had to do with Shurik each time. Aleksandr Demyanenko is funny again, but the real humor comes from the Tsar and his lookalike.
As one can imagine, farcical situations emerge from the two being unfamiliar with each other's times and social positions, but the jokes themselves don't seem predictable. On the contrary, the whole thing has a huge, infectious sense of fun about it, from the silly opening credits to Miloslavsky's breaking of the fourth wall, to the self-consciously reset ending. It feels like everyone involved decided they gave a damn only about making a fun movie, and the fun is infectious.
I'm only learning Russian now as a second language, so I could tell that there were jokes that arise out of Ivan's use of Slavonic archaisms and Bunsha'a inability to do the same, but I don't think I got all the subtleties that there were there. But didn't stop me from thinking this was one of the funniest and most enjoyable of the Russian comedies which I have been watching lately.