Annie Lennox - Totally Diva
This DVD, an expanded version of the Grammy-winning 1992 video  companion to Annie Lennox'ssolo 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,Divaisn'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 inDangerous  Liaisons.--Sam Sutherland