the blood at the corner of your eye

So, Sweeney Todd. Grand guignol is alive and well and being wantonly perpetrated by Tim Burton, in shades of black, grey and blood-red which are curiously appropriate to the jagged edges and dark undertones of Sondheim's music. I loved this movie, unsurprisingly given that it joyously compresses Victoriana, Johnny Depp, opera, Alan Rickman, gothic melodrama and Tim Burton into the same hour and a half, thereby pushing more of my buttons than an octopus in a button factory, but it also traumatised me more than somewhat. It's very, very bloody, and even my patented technique of uttering maidenly "eek"s while shying away from the screen and covering my eyes is insufficient in the face of all those nasty gurgling noises as the slashed throats spout.

This is not, in fact, even a musical. It's opera, and proud of it. The music is demanding and layered, and more or less continuous: the approximately three and a half actual spoken words were jarring and out of place given the expressiveness of the sung. The darkness of theme is also operatic in the extreme, and the film generally made me realise how incredibly bloody most tragic opera would be if you allowed the various epic deaths any sort of realistic cinematic representation. It's also a truly bizarre mix of the tragic, the bloody and the blackly comic: I don't know what it is about cannibalism that ends up being funny, possibly it's just in the context of this perfectly pragmatic and wholesale slaughter, but the political undertones of "A Little Priest" were bleakly, horribly amusing. The poor will rise and eat the upper classes, indeed.

I was very impressed with the singing voices of almost all concerned. I didn't like Joanna, she was pale and wishywashy and tended to squeak, but that Johnny Depp, he can put over a tune! and, of course, Alan Rickman does Noel Coward in his spare time. But I was also struck afresh by just how damned expressive a medium music is for emotion and resonance - a duet, when you get down to it, is simply magical. There's no other way you can allow two people to express their feelings, often diametrically opposed feelings, simultaneously, without clashing or even consciousness of each other, in a way that's welded into a cohesive and extremely beautiful whole while retaining the integrity and disparity of its parts. Sondheim is a clever writer and many of these duets are marvels of irony, opposing meaning and emotional clash while nonetheless being lyrically beautiful. The music was actually beautifully appropriate to the tensions at the heart of the story - as someone driven mad by suffering and loss, Sweeney Todd is a far more sympathetic character than the cheerfully pragmatic and blindly self-interested Mrs. Lovett. Or maybe that's just the Johnny Depp Effect. I did like her costumes, though. Frilly goth.