Heaven

Shortly before he died in 1996, Krzysztof Kieslowski announced that he was considering making a new trilogy of films. Following on from his successes with Three Colours Blue, White and Red (1993, 1993 and 1994, respectively), this next triumvirate would look at Heaven, Hell and Purgatory. He would write them with his long-time collaborator, Krzysztof Piesiewicz. Whether Kieslowski intended to direct them as well, or hand them out to new, younger filmmakers (as had been his plan with Dekalog, until he relented and directed all ten episodes himself - and thank goodness he did) we'll never know. But now Tom Tykwer, the director of Run Lola Run (1999) and The Princess and the Warrior (2001), has brought the first part of the trilogy to the screen.

Cate Blanchett plays Philippa Paccard, an English woman living in Turin. When the film opens, she is in the process of planting a bomb in an office block. Through a twist of fate, it kills not the man for whom it is intended, but four innocents: a father and his two small daughters, and a cleaning woman. Philippa is held in custody, but when she insists on testifying in English, Filippo (Giovanni Ribisi), a young member of the Caribinieri, is on hand to translate. Philippa explains that the man she was trying to kill is the head of a large drugs racket, a fact which she has tried repeatedly, and in vain, to bring to the attention of the authorities, so she decided to take the law into her own hands. Filippo falls in love with her, helps her to escape and to kill the drug lord. Once the lovers go on the run, the film shifts from city-set thriller to rural idyll, but the police are closing in...

Even though Tykwer's mission is not as explicitly an act of paying tribute as Spielberg's was when he realised Stanley Kubrick's AI (2001) project, it is almost impossible to watch Heaven without thinking of Kieslowski. This might seem unfair on the film, but the issue is compounded by Tykwer's mise en scène, which has shifted from his previous hyper-kinetic pop-art style towards the more contemplative, metaphysical preoccupation that was Kieslowski's signature. There are specific moments which seem lifted from, or at least self-consciously inspired by, earlier Kieslowski works. For instance, the vertical gap between the elevator doors when the bomb explodes is reminiscent of the view of the doomed ferry as it leaves the dock in Red; the many crane shots in Heaven have the flavour of Kieslowski's semi-regular cinematographer, the late Piotr Sobocinski; Tykwer's piano motif is almost a pastiche of Zbigniew Preisner's compositions for the likes of Blue and The Double Life of Véronique (1991).

The lengthy bomb-placing sequence near the start allows us to settle in and try to accept Heaven on its own terms: Tykwer's pacing is very slow, which is fine at first, as he creates suspense in the Hitchcockian manner of allowing us to see the bomb from the outset and then to follow its route round the office block while it ticks away. And because it is Blanchett committing this act of terrorism and not, say, Tim Roth, we are instantly intrigued as to why she is doing it; in the interrogation scenes, we share not the officials' rage but Filippo's inquisitiveness. Already, though, there are problems: Blanchett and Ribisi are English-speaking actors; Tykwer is a German film director shooting in Italian and English for the first time. We have already seen Harvey Weinstein's name on the opening credits as an executive producer, and recall that Miramax, Weinstein's company, championed the Three Colours trilogy in the US, and were instrumental in getting Kieslowski Oscar nominations for writing and directing Red. By this point, Heaven is starting to have the indeterminate character of a hybrid film. Of course, after the success of Dekalog in the late eighties, Kieslowski became more than just a Polish filmmaker: he made Véronique and the Three Colours films with funds from France and Switzerland, he shot Blue in Paris and Red in Geneva, and he filmed in French even though it was not a language with which he was too familiar. And there are times in those movies when the clipped, almost stilted dialogue feels like the work of a man who hasn't quite managed to bridge the language divide, and who has instead resolved to tell his stories using as little speech as possible. Kieslowski's strategy in his final films could be seen to mirror the aim of the deceased composer in Blue, to compose a work for the 'Unification of Europe'. The Heaven script, though (as filmed, anyway), does not seem to be especially about a unified Europe, and so the multicultural make-up of the cast and crew just looks like an effort to play it safe and satisfy as many people as possible.

This would have been more palatable had the story been more engrossing, but the events take place with such a ponderous worthiness, the film seems devoid of a life of its own. Tykwer and co. might sincerely feel it in this way, but it comes across as overly deferential to Kieslowski's sense of the metaphysical (and the universal), and misguided, too: Kieslowski's films were not exactly a barrel of laughs, but he let in generous moments of humour, and he was able to acknowledge the playfulness of his obsession, as in the use of the bottle banks in the Three Colours trilogy. And his films didn't lag: he wasted no time in setting up the ghostlike state of a central character in No End (1984) or the existential predicament of the young man in A Short Film About Killing (1987). But Heaven is made slow as if to convince us of the significance of its gestures.

That said, the second half of the film, where the couple flee Turin for the hills of Tuscany, contains many moments of exhilaration, as we feel the conflict between the spaciousness of the countryside and the nearness of doom. A journey through a train tunnel, the light at the end allowed to draw ever nearer in an unforced single take, conveys the joy the lovers feel in being able, for the moment at least, to be together. A rising crane shot as they walk up to Philippa's friend's house suggests the uplifting power of falling in love, its ability to soothe even while everything surrounding it can only prove futile. And their sexual contact on the top of a hill, the night before the authorities find them, is as effective a moment of borrowed time as Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis's prolonged kiss prior to the climactic showdown in Witness (1984).

But do we ever feel that Blanchett's character is in love with Ribisi's? Even when she says that she is, we know too little about her to understand what she means by it. The emotions have been stripped of particularity and are shown as purely elemental, yet as the film on the whole never feels like it is set in the real, contemporary world, it's hard to know by which elements the characters are governed. Rather, it seems that they are together just because they are called Philippa and Filippo, and because they share a birthday; and their matching clothes and haircuts in the film's latter half are spurious prettifications of their union.

According to the closing credits, Heaven is based on the entire trilogy, Heaven, Hell and Purgatory. Perhaps Piesiewicz means for this script to be the last word from his collaboration with Kieslowski - or maybe there will be two more scenarios available for filming in the near future. Heaven is a nice film, intense, and capable of beautiful things, but as well as acting as a tribute to a master, it needed to put aside the notion that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Reviewed by Edward Lamberti