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The Polish writer-director Krzysztof Kieslowski, famed for The
Decalogue and the "Three Colors" trilogy, died in 1996 while
working with his co-writer, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, on a new trilogy
inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy. (No one can accuse these
guys of not thinking big.) Their script Heaven, the only installment
completed at Kieslowski's death, is the basis for the new film of
the same name directed by Run Lola Run's Tom Tykwer and starring
Cate Blanchett and Giovanni Ribisi. What at first might seem like
a mismatch -- the brooding Pole and the hot-footed German -- turns
out to be something of a lovefest. Tykwer embraces Kieslowski's
themes of ardor and fate and redemption with a vengeance, and gives
them a propulsiveness that, at least in the early stages of the
film, makes them fairly easy to digest (Run Dante Run?).
He gets into the spirit of the piece, but in the end, that's the
problem: A great deal of energy is expended on metaphysical ruminations
that become ever fuzzier. The film is intended as an allegory, but
it works best as a jailbreak romance. In this movie, lowbrow trumps
highbrow every time.
Cate Blanchett's Philippa is an English schoolteacher working in
Turin who plants a bomb in a trash can inside the office of a major
drug dealer who has ruined the lives of several of her students.
Her plan goes awry, and four innocent people are killed instead
of the dealer. She is quickly arrested and interrogated by the local
judge and carabinieri. Her translator in these interrogations is
a young police officer, Filippo (Ribisi), who falls hard for her
and ingeniously engineers her escape. Churchmouse-quiet and cadaverously
pale, Filippo is an unlikely suitor for the firebrand Philippa,
who feels great remorse for her botched bombing but still wants
to get the hell out of Turin. Their romance is essentially chaste
in spirit; by the end, when they have both shaved their heads, Filippo
and Philippa look like twins from a galaxy far, far away.
The moral issues in Heaven are profound -- and profoundly
unrealized. Philippa's dilemma is that, acting as self-appointed
executioner, she killed innocent people in pursuit of the guilty.
She doesn't wish to escape her fate, and yet most of the time, she
never grapples with what is supposed to be her excruciating ambivalence
about guilt and innocence. This lack appears to be a fault of the
script rather than a deliberate attempt to show us her psychological
and spiritual evasions. Tykwer sets up a moral equation and then
doesn't do the math. (1 hr. 37 mins.; R) — PETER RAINER
Opens October 4
• Showtimes
& tickets (movietickets.com)
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