EUROPEAN filmmakers are just as fond of romantic endings as anyone else. But they'd rather wrap such sentimental conclusions in metaphor. It's nice but put some clothes on it!
For German director Tom Tykwer, love is the main force in "Heaven," its raison d'etre. But he chooses to drape the latter part of the film in abstraction. It's an extremely dramatic turnaround. Up until that point, we've been watching an action movie – or close to – full of hidden bombs, ticking clocks, a prison escape and two fugitives from justice. "Heaven" suddenly transforms from thriller to art film.
Giovanni Ribisi and Cate Blanchett star in "Heaven."
(Miramax Films)
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The effect is unusual, unexpected and strangely refreshing. For this movie to have resorted to a familiar action-flick finish with everything explained, pressed and dry-cleaned would have rendered it banal.
It shouldn't be surprising that the scriptwriters were Krzysztof Kieslowski and his longtime collaborator Krzysztof Piesiewicz, who together made those incredible color-coded films, "Blue," "White" and "Red," as well as "The Decalogue."
Like their other movies, "Heaven" looks for the ineffable in the most ordinary situations or, perhaps more accurately, the most ordinary movie conventions. It was to be the first of a trilogy ("Heaven," "Purgatory" and "Hell") until Kieslowski's 1996 death interrupted everything.
Miramax asked Tykwer (who made "Run Lola Run" and "The Princess and the Warrior") to make the film and here it is: a daunting task – to realize the work of a dead master – well done.
There's another plus: Cate Blanchett, who takes command of this movie, not only for the strength her character exudes, but also the vulnerability.
She's Philippa, an Englishwoman living in Turin, Italy, who has just made a desperate decision. She leaves a bomb in a trash can of an office. We don't know whom or what she's intending to destroy. Over the next few agonizing minutes, we watch the unexpected journey of that bomb as a cleaning woman picks up the trash and takes it with her.
Whose lives are now on the line? The unwitting cleaning lady carries the bomb into an elevator. When we see who's waiting on that elevator, we are sickened.
So is Philippa, when she hears the news. At this point she's a prisoner, sitting before a table of Italian interrogators, who believe she's a hardcore terrorist. We learn her reasons for what she did. And we change our perceptions. Be prepared for such things. That's what "Heaven" is all about.
Also sitting in the interrogation room is Filippo (Giovanni Ribisi), a young policeman and translator who immediately falls in love with her. He is about to become the hidden player in the room, devising a way to help her escape. But he'll have to convince the distraught Philippa life is worth living.
"Heaven" isn't about what happens to their physical well-being, it's about what happens between them. And as we enter their romantic reality, the movie changes along with this transformation. The story is like a rope whose ends have become frayed and dematerialize into something spiritual. You have to let go and ascend into the same oblivion, or find yourself sitting on a very hard chair in the darkness, wondering what you just saw.
HEAVEN (R, 104 minutes) – Contains a scene of sexuality and emotionally disturbing material at the beginning. In German with subtitles. At the Cineplex Odeon Dupont Circle and Landmark Theatres Bethesda Row.
