Eldar Alexandrovich Ryazanov (Russian: Эльдар Александрович Рязанов, 18 November 1927 – 30 November 2015) was a Soviet/Russian screenwriter and film director.
Born in Samara, Ryazanov attended the Soviet State Institute of Cinematography, graduating in 1950. His first works were documentaries. His 1956 film Carnival Night put him on the map and sent him on a fifty-year career directing theatrical features. (His last film, in 2007, was a sequel.) While his contemporaries like Andrei Tarkovsky got famous internationally for directing deadly serious dramas, and others like Sergei Bondarchuk made their names directing grand costume epics, Ryazanov made satires and romantic comedies, and thus remained largely unknown in the West. His films were hugely popular in Russia, however; The Irony of Fate became a New Year's holiday staple in Russia in the same way that It's a Wonderful Life is a Christmas staple in the United States. Working in the comedy genre also allowed Ryazanov to indulge in some sneaky mockery of Soviet life, most famously in The Garage, which is a pointed satire of stagnation and frustration in the late Brezhnev era.
Eldar Ryazanov on TV Tropes:
- Carnival Night (1956)
- Hussar Ballad (1962)
- Beware of the Car (1966)
- Unbelievable Adventures of Italians in Russia (1974)
- The Irony of Fate (1976)
- Office Romance (1977)
- The Garage (1980)
- Station for Two (1982)
Tropes:
- Creator Cameo: Ryazanov was basically the Russian comedy Hitchcock, finding a way to pop up on the screen in most of his movies. In The Garage he sleeps through the whole angry meeting, nestled up against a fiberglass hippo. In Office Romance he's a passenger on a bus.
- Extremely Short Timespan: Not all of his films, but several. Carnival Night takes place over a single day and evening and the production of an amateur talent show. The Irony of Fate is about 24 hours in the life of a man who gets drunk and makes an unplanned trip from Moscow to Leningrad. The Garage is an all-night argument as a meeting for assigning parking spaces gets out of control.
- Getting Crap Past the Radar: Ryazanov, being a maker of nominally non-political works, could make veiled criticisms of the Soviet state that other types of artists could not. The Irony of Fate starts off with a pointed Animated Credits Opening about how Soviet bureaucracy stifles artistic creativity, as an architect watches his creative design for an apartment building get whittled down to a boring, featureless rectangle—that proves relevant to the plot. The Garage, about how the staff at a nature museum spends the whole night in an increasingly nasty argument about parking spaces, is an obvious metaphor for the corruption and cronyism of Brezhnev-era Russia. Beware of the Car is a comedy about a man who specializes in punishing corrupt bureaucrats by stealing the cars they buy with their ill-gotten gains, which of course requires pointing out that the Soviet Union had a lot of corrupt bureaucrats. Carnival Night is about the people putting on a New Year's variety show, who are up against their stuffy, humorless boss, who just happens to be a Communist bureaucrat.
