/> Starring Tim Burton, Helena Bonham-Carter, Alan Rickman,
Rating: ***

Skilfully adapting a stage play to the screen is an art -form that transcends the relatively narrow precincts of 'pure' cinema.

In India Sanjay Leela Bhansali brought the state of the stage on celluloid in Saawariya with spectacular poeticality. Audiences didn't much care for the blue-tinted mise en scene of Bhansali's theatrical love story.

Blue seems to be the presiding shade of Tim Burton's wonderful play on celluloid about London in the 19th century. Depressed gloomy and daunting, the scenario of Sweeney Todd is so bluesy and bleak you wonder where the director derives the rescesses of joie de vivre that brighten up the proceedings in spurts of sunshine.

This isn't the first time that Burton has collaborated with Johnny Depp for a exposition on the bizarre underbelly of human behaviour.

In Edwards Scissorshand the pair was pungently -tuned to the bowels of the bizarre. Sweeney Todd is far more ambitious. It recreates the Musical in a tone and terns that are distinctly amusical.

Depp and his wonderfully-capable partner-in-grime Helena Bonham-Carter (long time no see!) often burst into stifled songs on the quality of love and life. He's the wronged Londoner returning home for bloodied revenge.

She's the sympathetic landlady with a meat shop that goes into overdrive after Depp's character starts supplying a meat of an entirely unexpected kind. What a ghoulish collaboration!

It couldn't have been easy to recreate a 19th century stage-play that depends on savagery rather than sublety for applause. Burton's narrative is shockingly brutal in portraying the end of love and the beginning of vendetta in a city so ridden with crime you wonder when and where Londoners got the time to assume so much civility in later years!

The plot trots into a hot humid environment of bloodshed without shedding its passionate plumes. Depp slits throats with the same deftness that the film's editor displays in cutting the narrative into a stylish treatise on baroque brutality.

Very often you feel Brian de Palma has walked into Charles Dickens' London. The slasher genre gets a slice of lemony Broadway-blues. And the principal players take care of the rest.

Depp's appetite for the ghoulish is by now legenadry. Helena Bonham-Carter has played costumed characters consistently. But never one that sings in-sync with the sound of slitting throats.

Alan Rickman as the heartless villain who locks away Sweeney Todd's daughter in a well-equipped dungeon after brutalizing his wife, is the stuff filmy melodramas were made of during the time of cinema when heroes on screen needed special specification by opposition.

There is a deliberate effort to give the film a look of wide-eyed splendour without taking away the feeling of hell having no fury like a woman scorned, and a man conned.

And before we forget, this barber's brutal tale is also every entertaining.

You don't come away from the film with a frown, wondering why moral subversion is so bloody prevalent in movies.

Neither do you remember only the periodicity and performances. What you most take away from Sweeny Todd is its yummy yoking of stage conventions with cinematic luminosity without tilting the balance against or for either.

Foul play has seldom ecountered such fair play.