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Description:
This DVD, an expanded version of the Grammy-winning 1992 video companion to Annie Lennox's solo debut, belongs on the short list of long-form videos that achieve the stylistic and thematic cohesion of a great album. In its audio incarnation, Diva isn't tied to a formally structured concept, yet its songs probe a clutch of interwoven themes, oscillating between spirit and flesh as the Scottish singer muses over ruined relationships, vain ambitions, and quests for love and identity in alternately teasing and tormented performances. On video, director Sophie Muller loosely integrates the songs through overlapping imagery, allowing costuming, locations, or lighting to supply a dreamlike coherence in lieu of more conventional plot or character. In her earlier incarnation as the vocal half of Eurythmics, Lennox had already displayed visual savvy through both live performance and the duo's arresting, early videos, and she brings an equal sense of nuance and daring to these pieces. On the elegiac "Why," she and Muller entwine romantic disappointment and show business artifice by presenting the song as an interior monologue, heard as the unadorned singer applies make-up and dons a garish costume; Lennox barely opens her mouth until the final, searing bridge. Elsewhere, Lennox uses her remarkably expressive eyes to speak volumes, often with an exaggerated intensity that fits both the lush, dramatic contours of her meticulously produced music and the neo-expressionist atmosphere of Muller's visuals, underlined by a palette that tilts through de-saturated colors toward pure monochrome. The compilation's sense of time and place veers toward period melodrama with its wittiest segment, "Walking on Broken Glass," not coincidentally a musical high point, which casts Lennox as a spurned lover raging at a callow, flirtatious John Malkovich, whose cameo is a direct allusion to his wicked starring turn in Dangerous Liaisons. --Sam Sutherland
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