La dame de pique

Kesiniya Rappoport plays a Russian Diva who is staging Tchaikovsky's opera about a card game that one can win or lose. A young unknown singer badly wants the lead part Herman, in fact he wants to be Herman. He is literally willing to die for the part and willing to have mobsters fund his larger and larger bets to emulate the fictional Herman. Appropriately he does get the majority of screen time. However this is Rappoport's film and she dominates with a great performance. This Russian film is somewhat derivative, how could it not be, of the earlier Tchaikovsky based film "Black Swan". I think that this one is even better.

The script suffered a weakness then further compromised by a mediocre directing. The casting job was pretty good. Viewers who like opera would be glad to find out the opera scenes in this movie were quite good, quite a treat! The voice over for the two females and the young male actor looked pretty seamless, especially the young female's voice quality was superb. The storyline was a bit lame. Also, it seems that "The Queen of Spade" was the older diva, not the younger one. *There's typo in the short description of the movie: "...and finds a win it back", it should be "and finds a way to win it back" Also, Kseniya Rappoport's marriage year is 2016, not 201? Quote: Spouse (1) Dmitriy Borisov (201? - present) Quote: "In 2014 she met restaurateur Dmitriy Borisov. As of February 2016, they were married for some time."