Reviews

Film

Sweeney Todd

Directed by Tim Burton, starring Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter

No one has ever confused a slasher movie with a musical. Until last month, Tim Burton's widely anticipated Sweeney Todd opened in America after a fever of industry and internet buzz climaxing this month with Golden Globe nominations for best actor, actress, director and picture, even before audiences have seen it. Not bad for an R-rated movie, based on the bloodcurdling Broadway musical by Stephen Sondheim about a serial killer with a sideline in cannibalism.

In his sixth outing with his friend Burton, Depp ditches his trademark charm to play a chilling obsessive, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Returning to Victorian London after 15 years of false imprisonment abroad, barber Benjamin Barker disguises himself with the name Sweeney Todd in order to wreak revenge upon the judge who, he discovers, raped his now dead wife and stole his daughter.

But when flamboyant rival Signior Pirelli, played by with cape- swirling gusto by Sacha Baron Cohen, threatens to expose him, Sweeney kills him with one of his cut-throat razors. Faced with a frankly inconvenient yet juicy dead body to dispose of, Sweeney's pie shop landlady, a beautifully demented Helena Bonham Carter, comes up with a ghastly plan. "With the price of meat what it is..."

Depp was musical enough to have been a guitarist in a variety of rock bands, a fairly essential quality given the notorious complexity of the almost operatic score. Having worked on a demo in a friend's garage to see if he really did have the vocal chops, he clearly found a voice. Even industry sceptics devoted to the much-loved original Broadway cast album have been surprised by the sheer expressive power issuing forth from Depp's lungs.

Angela Lansbury's original Mrs Lovett on stage in 1979 was a memorable monster, a fire-breathing cockney wisecracker. Bonham Carter retains the character's big hair in a pile-up of curls, but in all other respects she scales everything back. The result is quietly lethal. She almost breathes the music out, as if letting the audience in on her private musings as she reveals her secret passion for Sweeney. The Guardian

Books

Aptitude for destruction

Homecoming by Bernhard Schlink, translated by Michael Henry Heim ( Pantheon Books) and Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier, translated by Barbara Harshav (Grove Press)

What are the abstract ideas, the justifications, the words, that put acts of destruction into motion? And how can we be sure we won't repeat them? Two German novels recently translated into English - one sensitive and disturbing, by Bernhard Schlink; the other fantastical, long-winded and dull, by the Swiss-born philosopher Peter Bieri (who writes his novels under the pen name Pascal Mercier) - wrap these questions in the cloak of fiction. In Schlink's Homecoming, a German legal scholar and publisher comes across a defense of the Nazi siege of Leningrad written in the 1940s by a man named Volker Vonlanden. Justifying the siege on the grounds of the "iron rule" of law, which "supplies the foundation for all authority and leadership," Vonlanden wrote that "if you are willing to subject yourself to something, you have the right to subject others to it."

Like Homecoming, Pascal Mercier's Night Train to Lisbon delves into the question of national and personal identity, contains a text within a novel and explicitly invokes the tale of Odysseus and his 20-year journey through pain toward self-knowledge. This is where the resemblance ends. Mercier has built his plot on escapist fantasy, and put the Portuguese dictator Antonio Salazar's authoritarian regime at the core of his inquiry. Both are novels of homecoming whose heroes aren't sure what "home" means. The New York Times Syndicate

(China Daily 01/16/2008 page20)