AllMovie

Meant for ballet aficionados, Swan Lake is a routinely filmed performance of the Bolshoi Ballet with no additional footage or subplots. Chief ballerina Maya Plisetskay emotively dances the part of Odette, the Queen of the Swans, the woman who will be doomed to take on the form of a swan unless she can find her true love. Nicolai Fadeyechev dances Prince Siegfried, the Queen's counterpart, equally looking for his own true love. Will the potential lovers meet? Not if the Evil Spirit (Vladimir Levashev) has anything to say about it. He wants to keep Odette under his spell, forever. Unfortunately, the camera is not always where it should be in tracking the performers, there is a color shift, and other flaws render the film less than equal to the performance itself.