Mania Zhizeli on AllMovie

During the 1920s, Russian ballerina Olga Spesivtseva created the definitive version of Giselle. This Russian biopic tells her story. Though she was once one of the most famous ballerinas in the world, Spesivtseva, died alone and forgotten in a U.S. mental institution in 1991 at the age of 96. Olga began her illustrious career as a teenager. While in ballet school she became the lover of an important arts journalist. He was much older and after a few years she took a new lover. Unfortunately, Olga was unlucky in love and was frequently attracted to men who turned out to be homosexuals. As the years passed, she found it increasingly difficult to control her paranoid delusions and had to be institutionalized.