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Heaven Director:Tom Tykwer. Writers: Krzysztof Kiesfowski, Krzysztof Piesiewicz. Producers: Steven Arndt, Frédérique Dumas-Zajdela, William Horberg, Maria Kopf. Cinematographer: Frank Griebe. Music: Arvo Part, Marius Ruhland, Tom Tykwer. Miramax.
Two lovely lovers on the run from the law, but love conquers all. In a way. It's easy to dismiss Tom Tykwer's Heaven (2002) as an improbable melodrama. How plausible can a love story between a woman bomber and a virgin cop 12 years younger be? A kind of Sirk du soleil? But such a literalist approach misses the film's celestial aspiration. The project gives Polish auteur Krzysztof Kiesfowski a voice from beyond the grave-it's based on the first part of a trilogy he wrote with Krzysztof Piesiewicz. When Kieslowski died in 1996, Miramax producer Harvey Weinstein offered the script to Anthony Minghella, who eventually declined.1 As Tykwer resurrected Kieslowski's vision, the film is doubly about heaven: how we look from there and how we can get there.
True, the lovers-on-the-lam plot smacks of Bonnie and Clyde-Italian style. Phillipa Paccard (Cate Blanchett) teaches English in Turin. After her husband dies of an overdose and she sees her students victimized by drugs, she warns the police that a prominent electronics executive heads the city's drug operation. They're not impressed that his name, Vendici, denotes "dealer." When the cops don't act, Phillipa puts a bomb in Vendici's office. By mischance it kills not him but a cleaning lady, along with a chance passerby and his two little daughters. Phillipa is arrested and charged with terrorism. When she learns how her plot has misfired she faints in horror.
Yet despite her guilt, Phillipa wins the instinctive support of Filippo (Giovanni Ribisi), the young policeman who has been recording and translating her intense interrogation. When he offers to help her escape, she accepts, just to complete her mission. After she kills the drug magnate she flees with Filippo. They make love in a country meadow. When the carabinieri arrive, the couple steals the police helicopter and rises into heaven.
Phillipa and Filippo seem unlikely prospects for romance. While she is mature, Filippo continues the near-fetal naïvete that Ribisi has projected in such films as Saving Private Ryan, Boiler Room, and Amen. The callow lad regresses to his bed-wetting-a valediction to the business of youth-when he realizes he is in love with the bomber. He lives in the shadow of his father, formerly Turin's police chief, now even higher up in the police hierarchy. By helping Phillipa, Filippo (1) proves to be a masterful strategist, and (2) knowingly throws away his respectable life and career for a killer who has not yet evinced any interest in him.
Their love begins when Phillipa comes out of her faint and clutches Filippo's finger. Like God's finger reaching down to Michelangelo's Adam, this touch galvanizes both of them to new life. Phillipa snaps Filippo into a new fullness of living, into a new maturity. Now he dares to do what he believes to be right, in the face of the values and legality of his father's world. In return, Filippo renews Phillipa's spirit. He enables her to complete her illegal but principled mission and he revives her self-respect. "I don't want to escape punishment," she tells Filippo after he has rescued her. "I killed four innocent people and I want to accept punishment for that"-but only after she has killed Vendici. Typical of Kieslowski, both characters find an unconventional ethic for self-actualization.
Filippo returns Phillipa to atonement and grace in three key scenes. In the first, the fleeing couple takes refuge in a country church. What appears to be Phillipa's Catholic confession-"I have lied. . . . I was unfaithful"-is heard not by the priest but by Filippo. She tells him she can't live with the fact she killed four people and that she no longer believes "in sense, in justice, in life." For the resigned Catholic Kieslowski, the Church's power lies not its exclusive mediation between man and God but in its provision of a site for human community and communion. Phillipa's confession, atonement, and absolution center upon Filippo, her secular savior. Against a hauntingly simple cello and piano duet, Filippo absolves her: "I love you." She leaves heartened: "I know. It's just-it's just that I want the end to come soon."
Her grace deepens in the second conversion scene. When the outlaws meet with Filippo's father outside the church, he knows that Filippo loves Phillipa, but asks whether she loves him. Phillipa considers for a full 20 seconds. Presumably she weighs her sense of this strange young man-her gratitude and admiration for his planning and engineering their escape, the possibility and consequences of his returning with his father to his normal life, their limited prospects together-before giving the answer to which she is intensely committed: "Si."
In the final conversion their union takes two forms. The first is their love-making, idyllic under a moonlit tree. The dusk silhouette reduces the horizontal field to its essence. The second is their helicopter escape, which is sheer vertical. These two scenes complete the alternative cross of their grace.
The lovers escape not so much the law as our earthbound life and morality. As the helicopter instructor in the film's opening scene warns Filippo, "In a real helicopter you can't just keep going higher." The film will answer the pupil's question: "How high can I fly?" When our lovers soar up, it is to their unseen death, free from the physical violation of, say, Bonnie and Clyde, more like, say, Thelma and Louise. That's the film's real romance, not the love: our heroes don't break or escape the law but transcend it. Until now, Phillipa's plans have been thwarted by chance and mischance. Her divorce was prevented when her husband OD'd. Her bombing is redirected to the innocents. In soaring off together, the lovers finally control their lives. They die ethically and romantically fulfilled.
Perhaps Tykwer's romantic energy has tempered Kieslowski's moral rigor, because it's hard not to embrace these killers. Phillipa's virtue is carefully established. She decides to deploy the bomb only after the funeral of a 13-year-old druggie's suicide. She takes pains to target only the drug dealer, luring away his receptionist with a false phone call. Before the bomb goes off, she tells the police why she planted it and gives her name.
When they shave their heads to elude their hunters, Phillipa and Filippo turn into twins. Despite their initial differences, they complete each other. Their homonymous names suggest their essential bond. They even have the same birthday, though Filippo was born on the day Phillipa, gowned in white like a bride, had her first Communion-a ceremony that prefigures their present union. Phillipa's radiant skull also evokes Falconetti in Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc-another inspired Christian martyr who transcends the compromised world and an antipathetic church.
When the fugitives escape from the jail in the back of a milk truck, the driver pauses for a quickie with a sweets seller. That scene contrasts to our heroes' slow love. Phillipa is touched by her savior's delicacy when he sleeps chastely beside her on their first night together and when he directs her to the shower.2 With the same discretion, the camera withdraws from the silhouette love scene.
Tykwer and his D.P., Frank Griebe, flash their familiar cinematic brio with a panoply of high-angle shots. The first is the artifice of the flight-simulation video, a full-screen green and yellow field; the trees anticipate the lovers' night scene. In a dramatic downshot later in the film, we see an elevator rise as Phillipa enters the building below. In a later eye-level shot, she descends in the outside escalator while the elevator rises. Then Tykwer provides the first of several aerial sweeps across our world, as if from a helicopter. These angel-or Kieslowski?-eye views flatten out the spaces that normally tower above us. The effect is to reduce the three-dimensional world to a geometric pattern that we are free to transcend-or to prison walls that we are urged to breach. In this vein Tykwer exposes the carabinieri's fortress, with its tower clockworks, after Filippo has escaped its shallow authority.
In interior variations, the camera peers down on the interrogation room and on Phillipa on her prison bed. Each high-angle shot of a cell or enclosure confirms the prison implication of the city aerials. But some high-angle shots are benign, as if a blessing. One is accorded Filippo's father when he drives out to meet the fugitives. Out of uniform, in white and beige, he is the father, offering help should they want him to drive them back, and a thick envelope of money when they don't. He's a remarkable character: a father unimpeded by his duties as a police executive. "Why can't we ever do anything at the most important moments?" he asks, weeping in frustration. But he does: kissing Phillipa and hugging Filippo. His older son's heroic instincts and his younger son's efficient help with the escape show that he has effectively taught them human responsibility.
The aerial trope prefigures the lovers' transcendence of secular life and law. When the last shot holds on the sky until their helicopter disappears into it, the film remains earthbound to record this transcendence. In Heaven, director Tykwer relays Kieslowski's rejection of mundane values, and-exceeding the helicopter instructor's lesson-models the courage and openness required to get to the heaven that counts.
In Kieslowski's trilogy, the subsequent films were to be titled Hell and Purgatory. Oh, please God-or, even better, Harvey Weinstein-let Tykwer do them, too. His Heaven is a perfect start.
Footnote
Notes
1. Minghella remained on board with Sydney Pollack among the executive producers. The Polish script was translated into French, then into English, then into German by Tykwer. Minghella then helped translate it back into English. The print was released in Italian and English after a year's delay due to 9/11.
2. The ensuing scene-where two chattering cleaning ladies seem about to discover Phillipa in the shower room-may be an homage to the deaf cleaner scene in Hitchcock's Marnie. Again, we cheer for the outlaw.
AuthorAffiliation
Maurice Yacowar is Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Calgary in Canada. His latest book is The Sopranos on the Couch: Analyzing Television's Greatest Series (Continuum).
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